Re: Railgun Research: Barrrel Design or Power Supply

From: NuclearFirestorm (NuclearFirestorm_at_aol.com)
Date: 02/12/05 

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 02:35:02 -0700
To: sci-military-moderated@moderators.isc.org

Either approach looks good. I'd look into whichever system you already
understand the most and have some idea for making improvement.
Making a relatively small high voltage/current/power system will be
invaluable to future naval rail guns. If you can design something of that
nature you will have contributed greatly. After all any future electric gun
platform will need a good power source.

As far as rails go, I have faith that some rail/armature configuration can
erase transition problems, or at least raise the transition velocity to a
point above the desired muzzle velocity. I think that in addition to the
materials aspect, a novel rail design to control the electromagnetic causes
of transition may be needed. Maybe the Rail-Coil hybrid can solve that
problem, but it seems as if it would be wildly inefficient. The series
hybrid [1] is basically creating two magnetic fields in different directions
trying to propel the projectile in different ways. The railgun portion
works best with DC current while the coilgun won't work at all with DC. If
that's the kind of hybrid you after, I'd skip it and do something else.
Accelerating a railgun projectile up to transition velocity then letting a
coilgun take over sounds reasonable, at least using the railgun in that
manner you can avoid a good part of the rail erosion problems. The problems
with coilgun switching would still remain.

So if I were in your shoes I'd go after whatever field I thought my ideas
could advance the state of the art the most.

[1] A Novel Type Rail-Coil Hybrid Electromagnetic Launcher
Shirong, Y.; Ying, W.; Shanbao, C.; Guohua, P.; Xuqiong, L.; Wei, W.;
Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on ,Volume: 41 , Issue: 1 , Jan. 2005
Pages:266 - 267

"fallingsky" <fallingsky2093@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:1108075449.428020.267870@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> Hi! This is a resend of an earlier query that did not go through
> apparently. I'm a graduate student and a US military officer at a
> university that shall remain nameless. I've just started at my
> program's railgun office and I have a choice before me: continue the
> work they are doing on a new power supply for the weapon, or try out
> some new-ish ideas regarding hybrid barrels.
>
> The power supply is worthy work and interesting, but it is a long term
> project and not as innovative as I dreamed of when I started grad
> school. Instead of using the current planned systems of
> compulsators/rotating flywheels or high voltage capacitor banks, our
> design concerns a pulse forming inductive network, in which long-life
> low voltage capacitors or batteries feed a storage inductor, which then
> drives the railgun at much higher voltages. If I chose this one, I'd
> continue with designing the operational system and then building and
> testing different configurations, and different energy storage and
> switching mechanisms.
>
> My other choice is to push for a new rail design making use of some of
> the synchronous and asynchronous inductive coilgun/railguns that have
> been proposed in papers recently. A hybrid design such as this would
> possibly solve the limitations on the weapon because of rail life, and
> would also be able to compromise between the high initial acceleration
> of a railgun and the greater efficiency of a coilgun. When I asked
> about coilguns, the 1000 pound heads said that the reason they weren't
> being seriously considered was because of their much greater complexity
> and their high speed, high current switching issues. A hybrid design
> would not neccesarily resolve the complexity problems, but they would
> be a viable alternative to the current shot-limited railgun designs. I
> really think overcoming the rail ablation and arc damage issues are
> going to be nearly impossible, so I'm intrigued by the hybrids. The
> only problem is, I won't have a robust support network on this project,
> and I may be barking up the entirely wrong tree.
>
> So, what does the group think? What are the problems you see in each?
> What suggestions do you have? What would you choose to do research
> upon in my shoes?
>
> Respectfully,
> Fallingsky
>

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