HART hypervelocity augmented railgun test facility

The HART facility is a flexible multibank system for testing independently augmented railgun concepts. The HART I launcher has a 1.27-cm square bore with GlidCop rails and Al/sub 2/O/sub 3/ insulators. The bore components and augmentation turns are supported by G-10. Features which make HART I well suited for research on the approach of independent augmentation are its bore design, which can accommodate a variety of insulator types in tile or strip form, and the densely placed B-dot instrumentation. The results of the HART test demonstrate positively that it is possible to design an electromagnetic launcher system which produces high-velocity projectile launches with very low ablation.<>