An Experimental Study of Single Cathode Gridded Ion Thrusters

A Single Cathode gridded Ion Thruster (SCIT) has no cathodes in its discharge chamber and generates plasma using back-streamed electrons from a cathode outside the discharge chamber through ion accelerating grids. This paper describes a series of experiments that demonstrated the above principle. The experiments showed that discharge was stably sustained only when high propellant flow rate was given and propellant utilization efficiency was about several percent at most.