The structural mechanics of rail guns with discrete supports showing the influence of DES

Abstract

The dynamic behavior of the rail-gun housing, which includes the rails, is of great importance for the performance of the rail-gun system as a whole. As in the case of conventional guns, the mechanical response of the housing under transient loading (magnetic pressure) can lead to disturbances of the projectile trajectory due to momentum transfer. However, in the case of rail guns, these disturbances can be even more severe as the armature performance can be very sensitive to variations of the normal forces at the contact interface. In previous developments, the structural mechanics of a rail gun with discrete supports were analyzed using the conventional boundary conditions. In this paper, further considerations are focused on describing a specific distributed energy storage (DES) operation technique which was developed at ISL. Using the finite-element technique, numerical calculations were performed for the ISL rail-gun EMA3 equipped with a one-stage DES. Its caliber was 15 mm x 30 mm and produced a typical muzzle velocity of up to 1600 m/s, as well as peak currents of about 600 kA. Three spatially different DES configurations were used. The obtained results were then compared to the conventional breech-fed configuration.