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Under The Guidence Of: Mr. Jayavellu Asst - Professor: Presented By: C.Hemadri

Ion thrusters work by ionizing propellant gases like xenon through electron bombardment, creating positively charged ions. These ions are then accelerated out of the thruster by electrostatic grids, generating thrust. While ion thrusters provide very low thrust, they can operate for very long periods in the vacuum of space to eventually accelerate spacecraft to high speeds. However, ion thrusters cannot operate within an atmosphere like Earth's due to air interference and low thrust levels.

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Challa Hemadri
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96 views

Under The Guidence Of: Mr. Jayavellu Asst - Professor: Presented By: C.Hemadri

Ion thrusters work by ionizing propellant gases like xenon through electron bombardment, creating positively charged ions. These ions are then accelerated out of the thruster by electrostatic grids, generating thrust. While ion thrusters provide very low thrust, they can operate for very long periods in the vacuum of space to eventually accelerate spacecraft to high speeds. However, ion thrusters cannot operate within an atmosphere like Earth's due to air interference and low thrust levels.

Uploaded by

Challa Hemadri
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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UNDER THE GUIDENCE OF : Mr. JAYAVELLU M .

Tech
Asst.Professor

PRESENTED BY : C.HEMADRI
What is ION THRUSTER
 An ion thruster or ion drive is a
form of electric propulsion used
for spacecraft propulsion. It
creates thrust by accelerating
positive ions with electricity. The
term refers strictly to
gridded electrostatic ion thrusters,
and is often incorrectly loosely
applied to all electric propulsion
systems
including electromagnetic plasma
thrusters..
 An ion thruster ionizes a neutral gas by extracting some electrons out
of atoms, creating a cloud of positive ions. These thrusters rely mainly
on electrostatics as ions are accelerated by the Coulomb force along
an electric field. Temporarily stored electrons are finally reinjected by
a neutralizer in the cloud of ions after it has passed through the electrostatic
grid, so the gas becomes neutral again and can freely disperse in space
without any further electrical interaction with the thruster.
 Ion thrust engines are practical only in the vacuum of space and cannot take
vehicles through the atmosphere because ion engines do not work in the
presence of ions outside the engine. Additionally, the engine's minuscule
thrust cannot overcome any significant air resistance. Spacecraft rely on
conventional chemical rockets to initially reach orbit.
History of ION THRUSTER
 The first person to mention
the idea publicly
was Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky in 1911
 A working ion thruster was built
by Harold R. Kaufman in 1959 at the
NASA Glenn Research
Center facilities.
 It was similar to a gridded
electrostatic ion thruster and
used mercury for propellant.
Suborbital tests were conducted during
the 1960s and in 1964, the engine was
sent into a suborbital flight aboard
the Space Electric Rocket Test
1 (SERT 1). It successfully operated
for the planned 31 minutes before
falling to Earth. This test was followed
by an orbital test, SERT-2, in 1970.
How ION ENGINE WORKS
 An electrostatic ion engine works by ionizing a fuel (often
xenon or argon gas) by knocking off an electron to make a
positive ion. The positive ions then diffuse into a region
between two charged grids that contain an electrostatic
field.
 This accelerates the positive ions out of the engine and
away from the spacecraft, thereby generating thrust.
Finally, an neutralizer sprays electrons into the exhaust
plume at a rate that keeps the spacecraft electrically
neutral.
How ION ENGINE WORKS
where do they get all the ions?
 The thrusters create them by generating a plasma
inside the spacecraft
 They bombard neutral propellant atoms of some gas,
like xenon with electrons
 These collisions release even more electrons from the
propellant, turning them into positively charged ions
Can an ion engine provide thrust on
Earth?
 Ion thrusters are really great. Not only are they quite successful at
converting electrical energy to kinetic energy, they are quite effective in
getting you the the most thrust for a given mass of fuel.
 Ion thrusters give really, really small thrust. The force that they provide is
around the same force that a small piece of paper weighs on Earth. State of
the art thrusters produce about 0.5 Newton of force. To give you a little
perspective on how small that is, that's about the force required to push a
key on your computer keyboard.
 Another problem is that air acts as an detriment. First, it's an insulator which
is quite bad in the chamber of the ion thruster, since electricity needs to flow
though the said chamber. Second, ions can only ionise at low atmospheric
pressure. So, earth's own atmosphere gets in the way of the thruster working
on Earth.
 Ion thrusters can be used over very long periods of time. For example, the
spacecraft that was the first to reach a dwarf planet, Dawn, used ion
thrusters to reach a speed of 10 km/s.
 Imagine tapping something with the force of a key stroke for 270 days in a
place where there's no friction to get in your way. That little force over time
eventually accumulates to a big change.

And this is probably the best reason I like ion thrusters - it reminds me of a
phrase I've read somewhere.

"It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you don't stop"

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