The Design and Simulation of a Novel Electromagnetic Launcher with Permanent Magnet

This paper presents a novel electromagnetic launcher (coil gun) with permanent magnet (PM) as the projectile. The design, calculate and simulation of the PM coil gun are described. The excitation switching sequence of the coil and the performance of the novel coil gun including the electromagnetic force and speed of the projectile are presented accordingly. It is concluded that this novel coil gun with permanent magnet can achieve high speed of projectile within smaller package and with less energy consumption.

I. Introduction

Electromagnetic launcher mainly comprises of two categories: rail gun and coil gun. Due to the inherent disadvantage of contact and wearing problem associated with rail gun, only coil gun is therefore focused in this research and paper. The research of coil gun has been started and published more than three decades ago [1] [2]. Since then, there have been a lot of research and prototyping of coil guns, mainly in the laboratory's environment. The most common approach of building coil guns is to energize the coils around a ferromagnetic projectile [3]–[5], very similar to the principle of solenoid, and the resulting electromagnetic force will move the ferromagnetic projectile along its tube; and by switching the coil current at the right timing, the ferromagnetic projectile will be continuously accelerated along the tube.