Determining railgun plasma current distribution using Jansson's method to deconvolve B-dot probe signals

Abstract

The authors present a method of determining the plasma armature current distribution from B-dot probe signals. This method utilizes the knowledge that the B-dot probe signal can be shown to be a convolution of the plasma armature current distribution with the impulse response function of the B-dot probe. Jansson's (1984) relaxation-based nonlinear deconvolution technique is developed for use with recorded B-dot probe data. Results obtained with this technique indicate that significant improvement in estimations can be obtained over previously used linear deconvolution methods.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>