A combined discrete-continuous model for railgun simulation

Railgun weapon systems can accelerate projectiles to hypervelocities. Even though they are still at prototype stage, the feasibility of fitting a ship with such weapon system is an ongoing investigation.Given the limited power supply on board of ships, research efforts have been put in maximizing the efficiency of such weapon system against incoming missiles while minimizing the energy consumption.To conduct such optimisation studies, we rely heavily on computer simulated scenarios which are greedy in simulation time. For accurate modeling of parameters’ influence on weapon lethality and energy consumption, it becomes a necessity to simulate the complete projectile path from the acceleration in the railgun to its end of trajectory at target engagement and damage assessment. The nature of the complex physics involved in such simulations requires the modeling of the interaction of processes which can be represented by continuous time and discrete event models.This paper presents a computational framework which models the interaction of the processes during projectile acceleration in the railgun. It is computationally efficient to use a modular event driven environment where the different processes can interact. These processes can then be solved at different time scales with different numerical methods. The models are implemented using ConcurrentSim, which is a discrete event package in Julia that manages the scheduling of the events.The presented model is validated using data from a Distributed-Energy-Supply (DES) railgun. Parameters for a non DES railgun configuration (breech-fed) are then determined to meet the performance of the DES railgun used for validation. The energy supply for both railguns is generated by the discharge of capacitors banks.