Events

It’s been an interesting year for PATH. Different plasma sources and antenna prototypes have been studied and developed within the Consortium partners.

The second PATH summer school is held in Padua, where the experts and the students engaged in an intense discussion in how and why plasma should behave as an antenna, what is the best strategy to implement. The Summer school is the moment where the consortium can best interact within all the actors of the project, but also with interested students and experts, which input has been valuable.

PATH Hollow Cathode plasma antenna prototype

More updates will come soon.

Understanding plasma-wall interaction is quite challenging. This is especially true in PATH due to the high-density plasma required for the plasma antenna to operate. Prediction of the erosion arising from such interactions is one of the most important goals of a well performed design; engineers need simple design tools for a quantitative prediction of the orifice erosion.

In the framework of WP1-2, the consortium developed a simple analytical model for the prediction of erosion in the orifice of the Hollow Cathode antenna prototype.

The work was presented in the Space Propulsion 2018 conference held in Seville 14-18 May 2018. The Hollow Cathode technology is vey well know in the space propulsion field, it seemed more natural to describe and present the model in this field of application as the scientific and industrial audience is more familiar with the topic.

SP2018 – F.Coccaro presenting the work developed. On screen the PATH hollow cathode plasma antenna.

The proceeding is available here:

https://zenodo.org/record/1252989#.W0SzFNIzZad

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1252989