Design of a Multi-Turn Railgun for Accelerating Massive Load to High Speed

A multi-turn railgun system is designed to accelerate a massive load of hundreds for kilograms to speeds of several Mach. Generally, conventional railguns operate for a few milliseconds, accelerate loads of several grams to several kilograms with an acceleration of 10
⁵
m/s
²
to speed of several kilometers per second. Due to the strong limitation of the rail and armature, a conventional railgun is not capable of accelerating massive loads to high speed. Multi-turn railguns and helical electromagnetic launchers have the potential to accelerate massive loads to high speed. In this paper, the design of a multi-turn railgun system is presented. The designed multi-turn railgun has a length of 1000 m, a bore of 500 mm, turns of 30, and propulsive inductance gradient of 0.58 mH/m. The multi-turn railgun is driven by an inexpensive lead-acid battery based power supply in time duration of 2 s. A circuit model for multi-turn railgun and power supply was derived. Simulation results show that the multi-turn railgun is capable of accelerating 500-kg load to a speed of 1000 m/s. The feasibility and main challenges for developing the multi-turn railgun system are discussed.