DESIGN OPTIMIZATION OF COILGUNS

In recent years, many current filament coilgun models have been interf aced to optimisation routines. This has provided a valuable insight in to the operation of coilguns, and has generally yielded kinetic energi es superior to those obtained purely by analytical methods. Due to con cern over the presence of local optima, the use of a global optimisati on scheme, Simulated Annealing, has been investigated. In its basic fo rm, Simulated Annealing requires a vast number of simulation runs, and is therefore impractical for coilgun optimisation. However, a variati on on the algorithm, Very Fast Simulated Reannealing (VFSR) converges much faster and has produced good results.