Factors Affecting Ion Thruster’s Performance

In this project, we investigated how ion thrusters produce propulsion and how the design of ion thrusters affects the performance of the thruster. In the experiment, we build a high voltage power supply (0- 50 kV) and foil rings to produce ion wind. When considering the design of the thruster, we focus on three variables: the volume of the space, where ions are produced and the electric field intensity. Thus, to investigate the first variable we made foil rings with different radius and change the distance between the ring and positive cathode. To determine the propulsion produced we use a speed sensor to determine the magnitude of the wind produced.

Development of a High-Power-Factor Power Supply for an Atmospheric-Pressure Plasma Jet

This paper presents the design and implementation of a miniaturized high-voltage power supply with power factor correction (PFC) for atmospheric-pressure plasma jet (APPJ) applications. The sinusoidal output frequency and voltage of the power supply can be controlled independently from 16 to 24 kHz and from 1 to 10 kVpeak, respectively. A helium APPJ load is used to assess the performance of the developed power supply. It is shown that the developed high-voltage power supply operates effectively, and the designed PFC converter improves the input current distortion of the power supply. Not only the power factor of the power supply is increased from 0.41 to 0.95, but it also provides a low-ripple DC voltage, which reduces the high-voltage ripple of the output from 730 to 50 Vp-p. In this paper, the proposed design integrates the PFC converter into the high-voltage power supply so that the developed power supply has better electrical characteristics and the overall power supply can be significantly miniaturized.

Application of Particle Swarm Optimization in the Design of an ICT High-Voltage Power Supply with Dummy Primary Winding

The distribution of disk output voltage is a key factor for the design of an insulated core transformer (ICT) high-voltage power supply. The development of an ICT involves the design and optimization of many parameters, which greatly affect the uniformity of disk output voltage. A new ICT structure with dummy primary windings can compensate for the disk output voltage, which aims to improve uniformity. In this work, an optimization method based on a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm was used to optimize the design parameters of an ICT with dummy primary windings. It achieved an optimal uniformity of disk output voltage and load regulation. The design parameters, including the number of secondary winding turns and the compensation capacitance, were optimized based on the finite-element method (FEM) and Simulink circuit simulation. The results show that the maximum non-uniformity of the disk output voltage is reduced from 11.1% to 4.4% from no-load to a full load for a 200 kV/20 mA HUST-ICT prototype. Moreover, the load regulation is greatly reduced from 14.3% to 9.6%. The method improves the stability and reliability of the ICT high voltage power supply and greatly reduces the design time.