A novel method to predict current–voltage characteristics of positive corona discharges based on a perturbation technique. II. Global analysis and applications to electrohydrodynamic thrusters

Abstract

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) thrusters can silently propel small unmanned aerial vehicles without moving parts using corona discharges. Computational fluid dynamics would be a powerful tool to model the EHD thrusters and then optimize them. The drift-diffusion-Poisson equations govern corona discharges; hence, the equations can predict the current–voltage characteristics curves of EHD thrusters. However, the equations are too stiff to analyze EHD thrusters in the time domain. Here, we propose a perturbation technique to efficiently solve the stiff drift-diffusion-Poisson system in global (i.e., full two-dimensional or three-dimensional) and nonlinear (i.e., applied voltages higher than the corona inception voltage) regimes. Furthermore, we validated the method with the experimental results of a previous study.