Ion Engines

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-01-14 07:38am

We have an ion engine to day, but the exhaust velocity of it is only 30km/s, how does one increase performance? I've heard that one possibility is through a secondary stage where the ion's thrown into a particle accelerator and accelerated to higher speeds, before being ejected.
Is that possible?

Oh and on the topic, here is a new calculator I made:
http://hisshadow.123hostnow.com/misc/ac ... _power.asp

FX · Post by FX » 2003-01-14 05:10pm

My understanding is that ion drives work on the principal of placing a charged particle at one end of the drive and having oppositely charged grates that attract the particle till it rushes out the back of the drive.

Assuming this model to increase speed one would need to increase the charge on the grates, or increase the number of grates to increase the speed of the particles. Setting up an oval race track of grates that you could redirect out the back would also work, but give you a pulsed thrust instead of a constant stream of particles.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-01-14 05:13pm

Well it seems to me that the particles after the inital exit from the "ion generator" could easily be sent into a particle accelerator and gain further speed there.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-01-14 05:46pm

Shadow, from what I know about particle accelerators, an ion engine works on the EXACT SAME PRINCIPLES which would make it a mini particle accelerator. And 30km/s is no small amount.

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2003-01-14 06:08pm

There's a ton of stuff about ion drives and their limits on sci.space.*, archived on Google groups here.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2003-01-17 07:55am

In that case, why bother with an ion engine at all? Just use a sawed-off linear particle accelerator. All you need is a lot of power.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-01-17 08:06am

Arrow Mk84 wrote:In that case, why bother with an ion engine at all? Just use a sawed-off linear particle accelerator. All you need is a lot of power.

You'd need some particles to eject too, hence the ions.

I believe the idea is that an Ion engine can and will create ions at high velocities, but it would be more efficient to have a secondary stage accelerator too since that would it's sole purpose, the Ion engine has to "create" the ions too you know.

Enligthenment, care to verify what I said in any manner or form or will you kill me?