Investigation of thrust characteristics of a dummy hollow-anode hall thruster

To measure the thrust of a dummy hollow-anode Hall Effect thruster, an IT-20 thrust meter was used whose mode of functioning is based on automatic compensation for the engine's thrust by the force generated by a magnetoelectric compensator in the negative feedback loop. The dependences of the thrust on the discharge voltage and the magnitude of the magnetic field were obtained. The existence of oscillations in the discharge current was shown. The frequency of these oscillations matches the transit-time oscillation frequency of neutral particles, which may have an effect on the divergence between the calculated thrust values with those measured by the thrust meter.