2.xD - Particle-in-Cell simulation of radio-frequency ion thruster RIT-2.5 using cylindrical coordinate system

A kinetic simulation of radio-frequency plasma is a highly sough tool for ion thrusters.A Particle-in-Cell code, named \emph{PlasmaPIC}, has been developed to simulate plasma inside small-sized thrusters using massive parallization running on High Performance Computing.For particle-based simulation of the plasma in larger structures, the computational power increases rapidly. To overcome this limitation the variant named \emph{PlasmaPIC-Cyl} is developed using polar coordinates that use either symmetry conditions or a partial 3D approach.In this paper, the 2.xD - approach for the simulation of radio-frequency ion thrusters is described.It has been used for detailed simulation of plasma properties like density, the temperature inside the plasma chamber and the extraction of ion beam. The code is employed for the characterization of a radio frequency ion thruster, RIT-2.5, a thruster with a diameter of 2.5 cm. In this paper, the simulations are compared with the measurements so some extend to validate numerical model.We further show its applicability in grid erosion calculations which can be used for lifetime prediction of the gridded thrusters.