Design and Testing of a Two-Turn Electromagnetic Launcher

A multiturn railgun was designed to obtain high inductance gradient. It was made up of two pairs of copper rails. These two pairs were arranged up and down in space and were separated by the insulating structures. Each pair was an independent circuit with its own armature conductor. They were connected serially at the breech with a crossover. The two parallel armatures constitute the projectile with an insulating container. The bore size was 30 mm 60 mm. The rails were tightened with two pairs of insulating wedges against insulating spacers. Two up and down wedges constituted a frictional pair. The upper wedges would move down when the barrel containment was tightened gradually through the bolts, and they would produce enough preload to the rails to keep the gaps of each rail pair to 30 mm. The magnetic field in the barrel was simulated, and the mean inductance gradient was estimated to be 1.3 . The B-dot probes were also installed to diagnose the movement of the projectile in the barrel. Launch experiments with a peak current of 299 kA were conducted to test the performance of this two-turn electromagnetic launcher.