Asynchronous Discharge of an Eight-Module Superconducting Pulsed Power Supply for Driving an Electromagnetic Railgun

Researches on the synchronous parallel discharge of multimodule pulsed power supply have confirmed that it can output large pulse currents with high amplitude. For electromagnetic railguns, excess current may cause orbital erosion and other problems, and the ideal driving current is rectangular pulse currents. Therefore, the asynchronous discharge of multimodule superconducting pulsed power supply (SPPS) is studied in this paper to reduce the amplitude and increase the pulsewidth for driving an electromagnetic railgun. A toroidal SPPS based on eight coupled high-temperature superconducting pulsed power transformers and a dynamic simulation model of electromagnetic railgun is established. The simulation results show that armature currents with different amplitude and pulsewidth can be obtained by adjusting the trigger delay time of each module. With the increase of the trigger delay time, the amplitude decreases but the pulsewidth increases. With a set of trigger delay time, the asynchronous discharge of the eight-module SPPS can output an approximate rectangular pulse current with amplitude of 126 kA. The armature and projectile with a total mass of 50 g can be accelerated to 346 m/s, giving the efficiency of 16.2%.