An improved electron pre-sheath model for TSS-1R current enhancement computations

Authors

Chunpei Cai, Michigan Technological UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-16-2017

Department

Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics

Abstract

This report presents improvements of investigations on the Tethered Satellite System (TSS)-1R electron current enhancement due to magnetic limited collections. New analytical expressions are obtained for the potential and temperature changes across the pre-sheath. The mathematical treatments in this work are more rigorous than one past approach. More experimental measurements collected in the ionosphere during the TSS-1R mission are adopted for validations. The relations developed in this work offer two bounding curves for these data points quite successfully; the average of these two curves is close to the curve-fitting results for the measurements; and an average of 2.95 times larger than the Parker-Murphy theory is revealed. The results indicate that including the pre-sheath analysis is important to compute the electron current enhancement due to magnetic limitations.

Publisher's Statement

© 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace4010016

Publication Title

Aerospace

Recommended Citation

Cai, C. (2017). An improved electron pre-sheath model for TSS-1R current enhancement computations. Aerospace, 4(1). http://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace4010016
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/1878

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

Publisher's PDF