RAILGUN PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT FROM DISTRIBUTION OF ENERGY FEEDS

Both simple and complex railgun simulation codes predict improved rail gun performance when the electrical energy feed points are distributed along the length of the rail pair. The work reported here is an exper imental investigation to measure and quantify this enhancement for a 2 5 mm square-bore railgun using a solid metal armature. A test-bed rail gun was designed to accept power feed at the breech and at any down bo re location. The gun was powered by a 4.8 MJ capacitor bank that consi sts of 12 independently triggered modules.' A test series that include s 16 shots with peak currents between 410 and 620 kA and projectile ex it velocities between 23 and 3.0 km/s was completed for this study. Th is paper describes the railgun, the test series, and the data reductio n techniques used to compare performance between breech fed and distri buted energy feed point configurations. The compiled results support t he theoretical prediction that a distributed energy feed railgun is mo re efficient than the simple breech fed configuration.