Development of fluid model for electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) plasma

A 10 cm class microwave discharge gridded ion thruster has been developed in Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and was utilized for Japanese asteroid sample return missions, Hayabusa, and Hayabusa2. In the thruster, a mirror magnetic field is applied, and electrons are confined by the mirror magnetic field and heated by the electron cyclotron resonance (ECR). To understand the physical mechanism of the ECR plasma discharge, kinetic models might be desirable, while the computational cost is expensive. Therefore, in this work, a fluid model is developed for ECR plasmas. The fluid model is benchmarked with a previous work of ECR plasma [G. J. M. Hagelaar et al., J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 42.194019 (2009)]. In the presentation, we propose some numerical improvement for the magnetized fluid model such as the anisotropic diffusion problem.