If there’s something you would like your multi-million dollar electromagnetic railgun to be, it’s reliable, and the united states Navy announced today that it’s reached a key milestone towards that goal. It’s now successfully fired its prototype gun 1,000 times, which translates to as many as 15 shots every week. Lately, those tests have generally been conducted at a 1.5 megajoule launch energy, which the Navy puts into perspective by noting that “a one-ton vehicle moving at 100 mph has approximately one megajoule of kinetic energy.” Eventually, the Navy hopes to put in much more advanced and much more powerful railgun weapons systems on ships, although the project’s future remains a touch up inside the air given some recent funding battles inside the US Senate.
WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Materials Testing Facility demonstrated, October 31, the only-thousandth successful firing of its Electromagnetic Railgun, reaching a materials testing milestone within the weapon’s technological development and future implementation aboard U.S. Navy warships.
“This test demonstrates continued advances in armature development, rail design, and barrel materials utilized in high power railgun launch,” said Dr. Robert Meger, head, NRL Charged Particle Physics Branch. “Firing as much as 15 shots a week at the laboratory’s experimental railgun, researchers at NRL perform detailed testing and analysis of rails and armatures, providing S&T expertise to the Navy program that’s directly applicable to tests at large-scale power levels.”
Among the 1000 shots taken at the Materials Testing Facility railgun were designed to check different barrel designs and to quantify damage generated during high power launch. The innovations and understanding generated by NRLs’ S&T program has been fed directly into the Office of Naval Research’s Electromagnetic Railgun program and transferred to full-scale tests conducted on the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren, Va.
A railgun is a kind of single turn linear motor. Magnetic fields generated by high currents driven in parallel conductors, rails, accelerate a sliding conductor, often known as an armature, between the rails. The rate generated by the system is restricted by rail strength and armature materials and their response to the high currents and extreme pressures generated during launch.
At launch, heat deposited within the armature and near the outside of the rails because of high currents and friction, or. viscous heating generated on the sliding interface, ends up in temperatures sufficient to soften most metals including the armature material. If the heating and extreme pressures also damage the rail surface, it could possibly destroy the contact surface and condemn the gun barrel. NRL S&T research has pioneered multiple barrel and armature designs that minimize or mitigate this damage even during successive high power launches.
First fired March 6, 2007 at a magnitude of 0.5 megajoules, the railgun system at NRL was modified and enhanced during the last four years to function routinely at a 1.5 megajoule launch energy – a megajoule is a measurement of kinetic energy related to a mass traveling at a undeniable velocity. Basically, a one-ton vehicle moving at 100 mph has approximately one megajoule of kinetic energy.
“A railgun weapons system should be ready to launch hundreds of projectiles and withstand extreme pressures, currents and temperatures,” said NRL Commanding Officer, Capt. Paul Stewart. “Today’s firing of the only-thousandth shot demonstrates Navy researchers are steadily progressing toward achieving that goal, developing a more suitable and efficient future ship combat system.”
The Railgun Materials Testing Facility railgun makes a speciality of materials issues for a big Navy effort to develop a protracted-range, electromagnetic launcher for a future electric ship. The NRL Plasma Physics Division conducts a broad program in laboratory and space plasma physics and related disciplines, high power lasers, pulsed-power sources, intense particle beams, advanced radiation sources, materials processing, and nonlinear dynamics.
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