Magnetic Computing for Reducing Erosion of Rail Electrodes

To solve the erosion of the rail surface is one of the key problems to make the railgun more practical application. Much theoretical and experimental work has been done on this aspect, such as segmented rail construct, distributed feed power, pre-accelerator, augmented railgun etc. Because the energy used to accelerate the projectile is relatively small compared to the main energy, and the accelerating current needs some uprising time to reach a certain scale, the acceleration of the projectile velocity at the breech is limited. Thus we present a new way in which the coils of magnetic control field are used to reduce the erosion of the rail electrodes at the breech. The coils are mounted beside each side of rail electrodes at the breech. The magnetic field is calculated, and the effect of reducing erosion was investigated theoretically and experimentally.