An increasing rate of the near-Earth space contamination with man-made debris hinders the long-term sustainable development of space activities, including those in the actively used geostationary earth orbit. Space debris is understood as the non-functioning objects of space technology and their fragments. To solve this problem, an ion source has been developed that forms a weakly diverging ion beam, under the contactless impact of which a space debris object should move in the direction of the disposal orbit. Minimizing the ion beam divergence angle increases the range of impact on space debris object. However, there is a problem of the IS stable operation, which is associated with the functioning of the ion-extraction system that is responsible for the configuration of a weakly diverging ion beam. The ion-extraction system is the most critical and complicated unit of the ion source in terms of design and technology. The peculiarity of operation of the ion-extraction system electrodes is related to their non-uniform heating and deformation, which result in degradation of the ion source performance (ion beam divergence half-angle, ion current density, and thrust) and in the high-voltage breakdown. The electrodes have different thicknesses, can be made of different materials and their heating is characterized by different thermal profiles. For the ion-extraction system reliable operation, it is necessary to ensure the stability of gap between the emission electrode and the accelerating electrode in operating modes. Non-uniform heating leads to additional deflections of electrodes. Thus, it is important to be able to calculate the initial shape of electrodes and their deformation when heated up to operational temperatures, at which stable operation of the ion-extraction systems hold be ensured. The importance of not only using the developed mechanical-mathematical model of ion-extraction system electrodes, but also of performing numerical modeling for the deformed state of the ion-extraction system electrodes using a simplified algorithm. It allows the assessment of the deformed state with a significant reduction in modeling time.
Mogulkin et al. (Wed,) studied this question.