Design optimisation of coilguns

Many current filament coilgun models have been interfaced to optimisation routines. This has provided a valuable insight into the operation of coilguns, and has generally yielded kinetic energies superior to those obtained purely by analytical methods. Due to concern over the presence of local optima, the use of a global optimisation scheme, simulated annealing, has been investigated. In its basic form, simulated annealing requires a vast number of simulation runs, and is therefore impractical for coilgun optimisation. However, a variation on the algorithm, very fast simulated reannealing (VFSR) converges much faster and has produced good results.<>