Preliminary Study of Wear in the Solid-Armature Railgun

摘要

A model previously developed to investigate current and heat transport in solid-armature railguns is extended. The 2-dimensional model involves the numerical solution of coupled Maxwell and heat-transport equations in both the armature and rails of the railgun. The principal extensions include the development of a general transformation which maps an armature of fairly arbitrary shape into a rectangular computational region, and the inclusion of melting within the appropriate governing equations. Two specific applications of the theory are then discussed: analysis of an armature under experimental study at the Army Research Laboratory and preliminary calculations concerning the entrainment of armature material on the surfaces of the rails.