Improving the ion thruster scheme. III. Optimization of the ion-optical system

The current article describes the process of optimization of the ion-optical system based on the results of numerical modeling. The main objectives of the work are to increase the effective transparency of the ion-optical system for ions and expand the upper limit of the range of focused current densities. The optimization methods used are changing the shape of apertures from round to hexagonal, reducing the width of the bridges between the apertures and reducing the width of the grid-to-grid gap. The configuration of the ion-optical system created within the work has an advantage over the previously used one in all the main parameters except for the resource.