Spectroscopic diagnostics of railgun plasma armatures

The Railgun Diagnostics Group of the Applied Physical Electronics Research Center at the University of Texas at Arlington has been investigating railgun plasma armatures in a variety of operating conditions and developing new techniques and a database for such studies. The authors discuss the basic assumptions and their limitations in using plasma spectroscopy to study the conditions in railgun plasma armatures and describe their database for such spectroscopic studies. They also described a multi-input space-resolved spectroscopy system developed for the efficient study of railgun plasma armatures. In addition, they present the preliminary results for RGS-II. By using a novel spectroscopic technique, they have measured a plasma temperature of 1.2×10⁴ K and an electron density of 3.7×10 ¹⁶ cm^-3 in the railgun plasma armature