Contributions of the breathing waveform and residual fluctuations to power and higher-order spectra in a Hall-thruster plume
Abstract
Higher-frequency power in Hall-thruster plume-probe signals can arise from both harmonics of a repeatable breathing waveform and fluctuations about it, complicating spectral interpretation. We decompose 197 paired records from 20 sequentially sampled probe-pair geometries at one operating condition, estimating each phaseconditioned waveform from other records at the same geometry. The residual accounts for 87.1% and 99.7% of measured power in the 0.2-0.5 and 0.5-1 MHz bands, respectively, as medians across geometries. The repeatable waveform, however, reproduces the principal breathing-harmonic bicoherence structure. Residual power remains modulated by breathing phase after waveform removal, exceeding geometry-specific 95thpercentile circular-shift thresholds in both bands at all 20 geometries. Residual bicoherence is substantially weaker than that of the measured signal but exceeds record-specific random-phase thresholds in 195 of 197 records. An exact component expansion further shows that the all-waveform term dominates a specified signed third-order statistic over the fixed 50-80 kHz band near the second breathing harmonic. These results distinguish band-power allocation from harmonic organization within the evaluated frequency ranges. The attribution concerns uncalibrated probe-chain signals and does not identify distinct physical modes or measure energy-transfer rates. The findings motivate assessing repeatable-waveform contributions before interpreting breathing-harmonic bicoherence as evidence of interactions among residual fluctuations.
Related
- Simulation Study of Coupling Effects Between a Hall Thruster and a Power Processing Unit
- Semi-local Floquet theory for active azimuthal magnetic modulation of Hall-thruster high-frequency instabilities
- Effect of input power on plasma expansion and ion acceleration in a radio-frequency plasma thruster
- A Two-Dimensional Physics-Informed Neural Network Model of a Hall Effect Thruster Plasma: Self-Consistent Electrostatics and Physical-Consistency Diagnostics
- Time-of-Flight Based Waveform Measurement Technique
BibTeX
@misc{peng2026contributions,
title = {{Contributions of the breathing waveform and residual fluctuations to power and higher-order spectra in a Hall-thruster plume}},
author = {Zilong Peng and Baisheng Wang and Zhongping Zhao and Yao Tang and Yinjian Zhao and Daren Yu and Ming Zeng},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.11348},
eprint = {2610.11348},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11348},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Contributions of the breathing waveform and residual fluctuations to power and higher-order spectra in a Hall-thruster plume
AU - Zilong Peng
AU - Baisheng Wang
AU - Zhongping Zhao
AU - Yao Tang
AU - Yinjian Zhao
AU - Daren Yu
AU - Ming Zeng
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.11348
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11348
AB - Higher-frequency power in Hall-thruster plume-probe signals can arise from both harmonics of a repeatable breathing waveform and fluctuations about it, complicating spectral interpretation. We decompose 197 paired records from 20 sequentially sampled probe-pair geometries at one operating condition, estimating each phaseconditioned waveform from other records at the same geometry. The residual accounts for 87.1% and 99.7% of measured power in the 0.2-0.5 and 0.5-1 MHz bands, respectively, as medians across geometries. The repeatable waveform, however, reproduces the principal breathing-harmonic bicoherence structure. Residual power remains modulated by breathing phase after waveform removal, exceeding geometry-specific 95thpercentile circular-shift thresholds in both bands at all 20 geometries. Residual bicoherence is substantially weaker than that of the measured signal but exceeds record-specific random-phase thresholds in 195 of 197 records. An exact component expansion further shows that the all-waveform term dominates a specified signed third-order statistic over the fixed 50-80 kHz band near the second breathing harmonic. These results distinguish band-power allocation from harmonic organization within the evaluated frequency ranges. The attribution concerns uncalibrated probe-chain signals and does not identify distinct physical modes or measure energy-transfer rates. The findings motivate assessing repeatable-waveform contributions before interpreting breathing-harmonic bicoherence as evidence of interactions among residual fluctuations.
ER -