Characterization of Propellant-Surface Collision Byproducts Using MD Simulations and RGA Measurements

In this work, we employ combined numerical and experimental approaches to determine the chemical composition of secondary molecular species generated through particle-wall collisions for an EMI-BF4 ion beam. The numerical work builds upon previous molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of ionic liquid-surface interactions based on a reactive force-field model and n-body kinetic simulations of single emitter plumes. In the experimental work, a residual gas analyzer (RGA) is used to measure the collision byproducts of an ion electrospray thruster plume. The respective mass spectra show good qualitative agreement, providing experimental validation of the MD framework to characterize propellant-surface interactions for a wide range of ionic liquid ion source applications.