I designed and built this Hall-effect thruster to test the feasibility of a very simple micro electric thruster. I fueled the thruster with Argon using a long capillary tube as a flow regulator. The thruster was a compact design using a radial array of stacked rare earth magnets and a remote high voltage laser power supply. I balanced the system electric potential by making an electron emitting cathode from a heated tungsten wire in a ceramic guide tube. I tested the thruster for a total of several hours of run time in a custom vacuum chamber that I fabricated for thruster testing.
Michael Fuchs Personal Projects 