Design and performance of Sandia's contactless coilgun for 50 mm projectiles

Abstract

A multistage, contactless coilgun is being designed to demonstrate the applicability of this technology to accelerate nominal 50-mm-diameter projectiles to velocities of 3 km/s. Forty stages of this design (Phase 1 coilgun) will provide a testbed for coil designs and system components while accelerating 200 to 400 g projectiles to 1 km/s. The Phase 1 gun was successfully qualified by operating 40 stages at half energy (10-kJ stored/stage) accelerating 340 g, room-temperature, aluminum-armature projectiles to 406 m/s. The design and performance of the Phase 1 coilgun, coil development, projectile design, capacitor banks, firing system, and integration are discussed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>