Plasma thrusters and electric thrusters: a review

While traveling in space one of the hardest thing to do is stop or change directions without anything to push against or friction to slow things down spacecraft need to do all this hardwork by changing speed or path,. So they do this with the help of Pulsed plasma thrusters. The PPTs (Pulsed Plasma Thrusters) use Teflon, the same stuff that’s on the frying pan to make spacecraft move around in the universe. And this method is being used since the 1960s. The chemical propulsion is the best and only option for takeoff from the ground and leavesthe atmosphere but in space not very useful. In space Electro-Magnetic propulsion (EM propulsion) becomes available, they are not strong enough to take rockets off the ground but are great once the earth's atmosphere is passed. PPTs are high-specific impulse thrusters, accelerating charged particles or ions are thrown out with Electric or Magnetic fields. Today we have all kinds of EM thrusters but the pulsed plasma thrusters or PPTs were the first ones ever flown in space. They were used in 1964 by the soviet ZOND 2 mission to Mars. In this paper, we briefly describe the development of plasma-based propulsion systems and are classically grouped according to the thrust generation process: electrothermal, electrostatic, and electromagnetic devices and further the concept of various electric thrustersare introduced.