EML technology research in China

In the last 20 years, electromagnetic launch (EML) technology has been developed in the US and Europe, and the electromagnetic (EM) launcher has been regarded as a prospective equipment of propulsion. In the early 1980s, experiments on EML technology were done in some Chinese laboratories, and a lot of work has been finished in order to systematize the theory of EML technology in some universities and institutes. One result is that the Chinese book ´Principles of Electric Guns´ was one of the first publications of its kind in the world. Now, there are seven organizations which are participating in the research or experiments in China. They are the Southwest Institute of Fluid Physics (SWIFP), the Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing University of Science and Technology (NUST), Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Ordnance Engineering College (OEC), Xidian University (XU) and Institute 208 of Chinese Ordnance Industry (I208COI). The invention patents relating to the EML technology have been applied for; three books which directly relate to the EML technology have been published; some papers have been translated, compiled and published internally. The 15 papers submitted to this symposium involve the rail gun, the coil gun, the electrothermal-chemical (ETC) gun, pulsed power conditioning, energy storage, and an overview