Plasma thruster design throught a predictive model of the Proto-sphera experiment arc state

A predictive model on the Protosphera experiment plasma's arc state Daniele Iannarelli1* 1DIAEE, Sapienza, Roma, Italia *daniele.iannarelli@uniroma1.it In the last century the research on plasma physics has grown significantly since plasmas have found a wide interest in the scientific community and in the industrial one. Among the machines that has been built to produce plasmas relevant to nuclear fusion research, there are promising experimental devices such as tokamaks and spheromaks, where it is possible to generate an hot plasma throught the heating of an internal chemical specie and to confine it throught strong magnetic fields. These machines should also be capable in the near future to sustain thermal nuclear fusion reactions in a confined plasma volume and to generate energy without the production of radioactive waste. Therefore theese machines are currently under study as potential new sustainable energy production systems and engines' feeding systems. In the space propulsion field a strong interest is focused on the research on green propellants that can reduce the risk in the launcher's handling phases and that can reduce the impact on the environment while the thruster is working. In this contest fusion propellants and light non explosive propellants are the ones that can be selected for the design of future propulsion systems. For what concern plasma thrusters, they can generate a plasma throught an electric discharge and a thrust throught the acceleration and the expulsion of charged particles. For this reason the experiment Protosphera that has been designed and developed at ENEA Frascati Research Center is of interest both in physics and propulsion since it is an innovative technology for plasma production that can be integrated on a propulsion system in real or scaled geometry. Protosphera is an innovative plasma physics experiment that aims to obtain a toroidal magnetic confinement configuration from an arc discharge by means of magnetic reconnections. A first model of the central plasma column of the Protosphera experiment can be obtained throught the modeling of an arc discharge between the machine electrodes and its equilibrium. This simple model can lead to a first estimation of the plasma state in the core of the Protosphera experiment.