Design and Test of a Hypervelocity Electromagnetic Launcher

Abstract

A hypervelocity electromagnetic (EM) launch system is designed and employed to observe the special phenomenon when the projectile velocity is more than 3km/s. The whole launch system consisted of a 9MJ capacitive pulse power supply (PPS) and railgun device. The capacitive PPS is composed of 180 pulse forming units (PFU). Each PFU has a compact capacitor (1mF/10kV), a pulse shaping inductor (20μH), a crowbar diode and thyristor switch. The whole length of railgun is 5.5m, and with a travel length of 5.3m.Test results show that the PPS can afford a pulse current, which the peak current and full width at half maximum (FWHM) is more than 500kA and 4ms, respectively. The EML device can accelerate a 181.0g projectile to 3550.0m/s muzzle velocity when the input energy is 3.5MJ.And the whole system launch efficiency is nearly 32.0%.