Railguns allow to accelerate military payloads to large muzzle velocities and large muzzle energies. This enables the design of range enhanced artillery systems. These systems would allow to cover target distances of more than 100 km. As modern naval ships do have electrical power generation capabilities of the order of 10s of megawatts, it is reasonable to think of electrical, heavy naval...
The pulsed power supply is one of the most important components in the electromagnetic launch system. The IPPS (Inductive Pulsed Power Supply) has attracted researchers’ attentions with its major advantages of high energy storage density (over capacitive pulsed power supply) and easy control (over rotating mechanical pulsed power supply). Since the circuit topology of the basic IPPS module...
Barrel side and pulsed power supply module are two crucial parts of an electromagnetic launcher, which affects the efficiency. The most important feature in the barrel side is the shape of the armature.
In this study, the shape of the armature is optimized by using independent variables to define the exact geometry of the armature. The main goal is to maximize the muzzle kinetic energy of the...
Kicker magnets are specialised elements of the beam transfer system of particle accelerators, used to inject and extract beam from an accelerator. The deflection field produced by kicker magnets must rise/fall within the time period between the beam bunch trains; hence they typically produce rectangular field pulses with fast rise- and/or fall-times. In addition, the field must not...
The LHC beam extraction kicker system, composed of 15 fast kicker magnets per beam, is used to extract the particles in one turn from the collider and to dispose of them, after dilution, on an external absorber. Each of the 15 magnets is powered by a separate pulse generator, all of which are simultaneously triggered when a beam extraction from the machine is requested. Spontaneous firing of a...
It is proved by many researchers that the distributed-energy-store (DES) railgun can provide higher launch efficiency. This paper takes a 24MJ pulsed power system and an 8.5m long railgun as the simulation example, and analyzes the launch efficiencies and muzzle velocity accuracies from DES and breech-fed railgun. 24MJ pulsed power modules consisted of 234 pulsed forming units (PFUs) are...
The STRETCH meat grinder, put forward by IAT (Institute for Advanced Technology), is a typical inductive pulsed power supply (IPPS) unit for electromagnetic launch systems. When multiple STRETCH meat grinder modules supply one railgun load together, the currents flowing among these modules might cause them being coupled with each other. In order to promote the modularization of IPPS modules...
Recent studies have evaluated whether a ground-based electromagnetic (EM) acceleration system could provide a useful reduction in launch-to-orbit costs compared with the large chemical boosters currently used. Potential advantages of the EM launch approach include increased launch frequency, safety and reliability as well as cost reductions. There is a growing market for launch of small...
ASELSAN Inc. has been conducting experimental research on electromagnetic launchers since 2014. A 1 MJ Pulsed Power Supply (PPS) and 25 mm x 25 mm square bore 3 meters EMFY-1 Electromagnetic Launcher have been built at ASELSAN.
This paper represents results of the first experiments of EMFY-1 Electromagnetic Launcher with 1 MJ PPS and c-type aluminum armature. The pulse currents of the PPS...