Hall thruster

One of my latest projects that I'm doing in parallel with others is designing and making a Hall thruster! This is probably one of the least theoretical projects that I've ever done! I have no idea really what inspired me to do this, I was just thinking of accelerating plasmas in discharge tubes when I thought it would be fun to build a small scale one.

A Hall thruster is a device which accelerates a plasma through a discharge chamber via an electric field. The accelerated ions meet with electrons that are rotated around the devices axis by means of a radial magnetic field and so the now neutral atoms pass out of the discharge chamber.

It may not be possible to miniaturise a Hall thruster due some physical restrictions, if this is the case I can try to construct a similar type of device, generic ion thruster etc. So far I've made a basic model using COMSOL Multiphysics and I'm just in the process of testing different materials.

Simulating magnetic fields

Very early design of thruster

I don't really want to use the thruster for anything, I may even just make a general plasma accelerator. I'd like to look into attaching a simple plasma discharge chamber to some capacitor bank and see what amounts of thrust can be produced.