Determining railgun plasma current distribution using Jansson´s method to deconvolve B-dot probe signals

The authors present a method of determining the plasma armature current distribution from B-dot probe signals. This method utilizes the knowledge that the B-dot probe signal can be shown to be a convolution of the plasma armature current distribution with the impulse response function of the B-dot probe. Jansson´s (1984) relaxation-based nonlinear deconvolution technique is developed for use with recorded B-dot probe data. Results obtained with this technique indicate that significant improvement in estimations can be obtained over previously used linear deconvolution methods