Parameter study of an inductively powered railgun

Abstract

This article deals with the numerical simulation of an inductively powered railgun in order to determine the electrical parameters of the inductive storage of the pulsed power supply. A numerical model was set up and validated by experimental results. A parameter sweep was performed by varying the time constant of the coil, the initial current and the initially stored energy. The results show that the generated pulse shape, and thus the transfer efficiency and electromagnetic forces, strongly depend on the inductance of the storage coil. On the contrary, the dependency on the coil time constant, and thus on the coil volume for a given coil shape and conductor material, is small and can be neglected for high time constants.