Development of an induction type railgun

The remarkable feature of the induction type railgun is to enhance a plasma armature by transferring some part of a secondary arc current with an induction effect during the process of accelerating a projectile. Since the last conference we have built a new experimental system including an improved induction type railgun and a capacitor bank of a higher stored energy. This paper describes the experimental results obtained by the new experimental system. We performed the experiments both in a conventional railgun mode and an induction type railgun mode to compare their results. Not only an increase of the projectile velocity but also a reduction of the elongation of the plasma armature was observed in the induction type railgun mode. The projectile velocity increased from 2.4 km/s to 2.7 km/s, and the length of the plasma armature decreased from 26 cm to 20 cm.