Key Problems of Railgun: New Concept for their Resolution

Abstract

The analysis of railgun's key problems for high velocity macrobody acceleration and new approach to overcoming of these problems are presented in the paper. A threat of rails surface destruction and a crisis of sliding contact are included into the set of main problems of railgun with short discussion of physical phenomena during acceleration. Simple calculations on the electrical model of railgun commutation process under virtual high-speed displacement of armature have displayed the very important conclusions. There is shown in the paper the important role of commutation laws which must be carefully taken into attention especially at high speed velocity of armature. Meanwhile the most known investigations performed both in mathematical simulation and in the experimental tests do not provide the correspondence between conditions of armature motion and commutation laws what leads to the transition of contact metal - metal into the form metal – plasma - metal and into resulting crisis of sliding contact. The new concept to the resolution of limiting problems includes the special conditions to the materials and structure of electrical conductors in the railgun jointly with new variants of geometrical configuration for armature and rails. The new ideas have been illustrated in the paper by the results of mathematical simulation of the pulsed field and current density distribution at high velocity of armature motion (2km/s and more). The proposed concept can serve for the creation of principally new design of high speed railgun.