Triggering strategy of railgun power supply for the accurate control of the armature muzzle velocity

Abstract

As a new kind of kinetic-energy weapon system, electromagnetic railgun possesses one major advantage of high muzzle velocity which can be controlled artificially and accurately. Since the muzzle velocity error has a great influence on the hit rate, accurate velocity control is of importance. However, studies on muzzle velocity control are still inadequate. In order to solve this problem, the paper proposes a method to calculate the triggering strategy of the PFUs (Pulsed Forming Unit) of the pulsed power supplies. The armature acceleration process is equivalent to the uniform acceleration motion. And several velocity detecting devices are equidistantly placed along the rails. The triggering time of each PFU group is the moment when the armature passes by each velocity detecting device. The number of each PFU group is selected, based on the principle of minimizing the absolute error between the actual velocity and the ideal velocity (uniform acceleration) at the next velocity detecting device. In this way, the actual armature velocity waveform can coincide quite well with that of the ideal uniform acceleration process, thus the armature muzzle velocity can be controlled quite accurately. Simulations show that, with 0.15-kg armature mass and 6-m barrel length, if the target velocity is between 1.5 to 2 km/s, the control precision of the muzzle velocity is within 0.5%.