Purpose

The presented study aims to minimize the energy consumed by a Hall effect thruster (HET) under a constraint which makes it possible to generate a specified magnetic field in a target region of the thruster.

Design/methodology/approach

Herein topology optimization (TO) is used to reduce the energy consumption of an HET while keeping its performance unchanged. The design variables are the current densities in the coils and the distribution of materials in the polar pieces of the thruster. Intermediate values of material distribution are penalized using the solid isotropic material with penalization method to favor binary solutions. By means of the adjoint method, this paper provides the derivatives of the objective and constraint functions with respect to material distribution and current density variables.

Findings

The TO-based design methodology is developed and validated on a design example involving 2,051 variables. The approach shows its interest and its effectiveness of on a large scale two-criteria problem.

Research limitations/implications

In this paper, TO is presented as a tool that has allowed to explore new and innovative designs. However, although the design presented is original, its fabrication is not feasible. Despite this, the designs found give a good idea of the starting points for shape and parametric optimization tools.

Practical implications

Through the HET design problem, TO shows the ability to explore more original design possibilities of a complex magnetostatic design problem and to discover designs that make a HET more efficient with respect to several criteria at the same time.

Originality/value

A new way to reduce the energy consumption of a HET is presented. To achieve this, an adjoint-based TO method is developed and then implemented in a simple way. This approach shows that, for efficiency purposes, TO is a key tool for extending the state of the art of HET designs.

中文翻译：

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基于伴随的拓扑优化以降低霍尔效应推进器的能耗

目的

所提出的研究旨在最大限度地减少霍尔效应推进器 (HET) 在约束下消耗的能量，这使得在推进器的目标区域中产生指定磁场成为可能。

设计/方法/方法

在此，拓扑优化 (TO) 用于降低 HET 的能耗，同时保持其性能不变。设计变量是线圈中的电流密度和推进器极片中的材料分布。使用带有惩罚方法的固体各向同性材料来惩罚材料分布的中间值以支持二元解。通过伴随方法，本文提供了目标函数和约束函数关于材料分布和电流密度变量的导数。

发现

基于 TO 的设计方法是在涉及 2,051 个变量的设计实例上开发和验证的。该方法显示了其在大规模双标准问题上的兴趣和有效性。

研究限制/影响

在本文中，TO 被视为一种允许探索新设计和创新设计的工具。然而，尽管提出的设计是原创的，但其制造并不可行。尽管如此，发现的设计很好地了解了形状和参数优化工具的起点。

实际影响

通过 HET 设计问题，TO 展示了探索复杂静磁设计问题的更多原始设计可能性的能力，并发现能够同时在多个标准方面使 HET 更高效的设计。

原创性/价值

提出了一种降低 HET 能耗的新方法。为了实现这一点，开发了一种基于伴随的 TO 方法，然后以简单的方式实现。这种方法表明，为了提高效率，TO 是扩展 HET 设计技术水平的关键工具。