Conventional annular Hall thrusters do not scale efficiently to low power. An alternative approach, a cylindrical Hall thruster with a cusp-type magnetic field distribution, has been investigated. A relatively large 9 cm diameter version of a cylindrical thruster, operated in 300-1000 W power range, and the 2.6 cm miniaturized cylindrical Hall thruster, operated in the power range 50-300 W, exhibited performances comparable with conventional annular Hall thrusters of the similar sizes. It was

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... und that the cylindrical thrusters have unusually high propellant utilization, compared to conventional Hall thrusters. Results of numerical simulations, performed within the framework of a quasi-1D stationary thruster model, show that the increase in the propellant utilization does not appear to be quantitatively explained by a reduction of plasma wall losses. This indicates that more accurate description of the experimentally observed effect requires kinetic treatment of electrons. I.