Modeling of ETC plasma cartridges and their effect on propellant combustion

A one-dimensional, time-dependent fluid code has been developed for modeling an electro-thermal chemical (ETC) plasma cartridge. The power flow out of the cartridge is coupled to the interior ballistics code IBHVG2. For given pulse-forming network and gun parameters, the projectile velocity is maximized with respect to cartridge dimensions. In this paper, we report details of the computational model and results of optimization.