The addition of the acceleration stage to a micro-cathode vacuum arc thruster ( μ CAT) increases the thrust and the specific impulse. This improves the control of small satellites’ orbital parameters and, therefore, the overall efficiency of this thruster for CubeSats. In this article, we show that the second accelerating stage based on the magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) approach allows improvements not only to the thrust (almost twice, from 9 to 18 μ N), but the thrust-to-power ratio (in 53%, from 3.2 to 4.9 μ N W −1 ) of the low-power (several W) miniature (several cm—size) μ CAT, firing at a pulse repetition rate of 10 Hz. A significant advantage of the μ CAT-MPD approach is the griddle construction, a design that helps to overcome the loss of ions along the grid cells in the case of gridded ion acceleration stage.

中文翻译：

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用于CubeSats的磁等离子体动力学两级微阴极推力器

将加速级添加到微阴极真空电弧推力器（μCAT）中会增加推力和比脉冲。这改善了对小型卫星轨道参数的控制，因此改善了这种推力器对立方卫星的整体效率。在本文中，我们表明基于磁等离子体动力学（MPD）方法的第二个加速阶段不仅可以改善推力（从9到18μN，几乎是两倍），而且可以提高推力与功率之比（53％） ，从低功率（几个W）微型（几个cm尺寸）μCAT的3.2到4.9μNW -1），以10 Hz的脉冲重复频率发射。μCAT-MPD方法的显着优势是格栅结构，该设计有助于克服在离子加速阶段发生网格的情况下沿网格单元的离子损失。