Visual Evidence of Magnetic Shielding With the PPS-Flex Hall Thruster

Magnetic shielding (MS) of insulating walls in a Hall thruster (HT) drastically reduces the damaging ion bombardment, therefore significantly increasing the thruster operational lifetime, as demonstrated in recent work. In essence MS rests on preventing the field line from intersecting the wall in the discharge chamber downstream section. We show here that such a topology can be attained with the newly developed PPS-flex HT. The latter is a unique prototype that offers a wide range of magnetic configurations through a combination of 22 coils with a sophisticated magnetic circuit that propagates the flux.