Design of a Distributed-Energy-Store Railgun

A distributed-energy-store (DES) railgun was designed, which excels at higher efficiency in comparison with a breech-fed one. Such a structure was first proposed by Marshall and had been testified to lessen the energy remaining in the rails and reduce the rails' resistive loses. The pulsed-power supply consists of eight modules of capacitor banks, which can provide a maximum energy of 200 kJ. A 4-m-long 15-mm square bore railgun with several energy feed-in points distributed along the length of the gun was built to test the DES railgun concept. A simulation model was built up to analyze its performance. A comparison between the simulation results of different systems was made. Ten-gram projectiles could be accelerated to 1323 m/s through the simulation, and the overall efficiency of the system could be increased from 6.8% to 9.0% in comparison with a breech-fed one. An important issue for the DES railgun is the discharging sequence of the PFN modules. An ideal discharging sequence was obtained from the simulation result to get a higher efficiency. A real-time control system was designed to trigger the PFN modules properly.