Speaker
Description
Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) missions face strong aerodynamic drag due to the residual atmosphere of highly reactive atomic oxygen, therefore leading to material erosion, making realistic ground tests essential. Numerical simulations are used in advance to optimize the design of its core components to support the development of a dedicated VLEO test facility.
The planned facility generates negative oxygen ions, accelerates them to high velocities, and filters them by species and energy. Electrostatic lenses and a lattice pair then decelerate the particles to the target orbital energy of about 5 eV while maintaining a homogeneous beam. In a final step, a laser removes the electron, producing neutral atomic oxygen for erosion and material testing under representative VLEO conditions.
These processes are modeled with PICLas, an open-source simulation framework for rarefied gas and plasma flows, because experimental development is costly and time-consuming. PICLas combines the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method with the Particle-in-cell (PIC) approach, enabling a self-consistent description of particle collisions, charged particle motion, and electromagnetic fields. This approach captures space-charge effects inside the beamline unlike conventional ion-beam propagation tools. The simulations demonstrate a reliable basis for the future experimental setup of the VLEO ground testing facility applied to a realistic negative ion beamline geometry.
| Email address | ellenbergerk@irs.uni-stuttgart.de |
|---|---|
| Funding Agency | DFG (German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 516238647 – SFB 1667/1 (ATLAS) |
| Visitor's Visa | no |
| Classification | Numerical simulations of sources, beams, space-charge, ion-optics |