Simulation Study of Coupling Effects Between a Hall Thruster and a Power Processing Unit

The complex and nonlinear load characteristics of Hall thrusters remain a key challenge in the design of propulsion power-supply output stages. In existing power-supply simulations for electric propulsion systems, the Hall thruster is often simplified as a fixed impedance or a prescribed current source, which makes it difficult to capture the time-synchronized interaction during simulation between the power-supply output stage and the thruster discharge process. To address this issue, this study encapsulates a one-dimensional discharge model as an externally callable thruster slave and proposes a HallThruster.jl–Simulink–Saber co-simulation method. The proposed method enables synchronized bidirectional exchange between the power-port voltage Vcmd and the thruster discharge current Iout. The results show that the discharge current under the co-simulation condition exhibits a sustained low-frequency response at approximately 15.0 kHz. Compared with a fixed-voltage standalone simulation, the co-simulation preserves the same principal oscillation band and overall internal-field structures, while small but observable differences remain in instantaneous phase, local waveform shape, harmonic amplitudes, and high-gradient regions of the internal fields. The proposed method provides a computational framework for investigating dynamically coupled port behavior between a Hall thruster and a representative power-supply output stage.