Problem with Hall-effect thruster definition in SPIS 6.2.2

SPIS
1

Hi everyone,

I’m working on simulating the interaction of a Hall-effect thruster (SPT100 has been chosen as an example) plasma plume with a cylindrical vacuum chamber. As a starting point, I’m modeling only the SPT100 plume, assuming the chamber walls act as open boundaries. To simplify things further, I’ve decided not to account for any collisions at this stage.

For the thruster boundary condition, I selected SPT100_300V_2mg_v1.0EC-1 as the device property in the Group Editor, applying it to the surface corresponding to the discharge channel. As for global parameter definitions, I’ve tried using the default globalParameters.xml file, as well as global configuration parameters from the examples, available on the SPINE website. Specifically, I referred to the examples provided in ValidationCases-6.1.0.zip and AdditionalSpisProjectsSample.zip.

Despite these efforts, after running the UI2NUM conversion, SPIS doesn’t seem to detect any volume or surface interactors or particle species associated with the thruster in my simulation.

Interestingly, when I run the UI2NUM conversion on the satellite propulsion example, the SPT100 thruster imports successfully.

Could anyone help me figure out what might be causing this issue in my simulation?

Thanks in advance!

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Sincerely,
Egor

2

I think you missed initialising volInteractNb and volInteract1 under the volume interaction tab (assuming you wanted to to Charge exchange interactions of Xe)

3

Dear Fredrik,

Thank you for your reply. Back then, I chose to consider collisionless plasma to simplify the problem. However, I am now moving toward modeling collisional plasma. So, I appreciate your suggestion!

It turned out that my issue was due to an incorrect definition of the discharge channel surface in Gmsh. Once I fixed the surface definition, SPIS was able to import the thruster into my simulation.

Now, the question is how to change the thruster parameters (which, if I understand correctly, is still an open topic on this forum) and how to properly add collisions.

Sincerely,
Egor

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