English

Experiments to increase the used Energy with the PEGASUS Railgun

Plasma Physics 2023-07-19 v1 Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

The French-German Research Institute (ISL) has several railguns installed, the largest of these is the PEGASUS accelerator. It is a 6m long, 4x4 cm2 caliber distributed energy supply (DES) railgun. It has a 10 MJ capacitor bank as energy supply attached to it. In the past, this installation was used to accelerate projectiles with a mass of about 300 g to velocities up to 2500 m/s. In the ongoing investigation, it is attempted to accelerate heavier projectiles to velocities above 2000m/s. For this a new type of projectile including a payload section was developed. In this paper the results of the experiments with payload projectiles using a primary energy between 3.8 MJ and 4.8 MJ are discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1402.6094,
  title  = {Experiments to increase the used Energy with the PEGASUS Railgun},
  author = {Stephan Hundertmark and Markus Schneider and Dejian Simicic and Gregory Vincent},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.6094},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

6 pages, 11 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Special Issue -- Pulsed Power Science & Technology 2014