Design optimizations of a small caliber electrothermal accelerator

At the Lehrstuhl fur Raumfahrttechnik (LRT) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM), a small caliber electrothermal accelerator has been operated for several years. This paper describes the accelerator and the measurement set up and gives experimental results for different designs of the accelerator. To power the device, a 60 /spl mu/F or 352 /spl mu/F capacitor bank is used. In the work up to now, special emphasis has been laid on the design of the discharge chamber and its supporting structure. Several ways to realize a stiff design are discussed and compared experimentally. It can be shown that the performance of the accelerator is drastically influenced by its design. A main goal of the experiments described was to test the different designs to their limits. The maximum velocity obtained so far is 5.5 km/s for a 28 mg projectile.<>