Railgun (0)

Referaat
Railgun

Table of contents

Introduction 3
1.What a railgun basically is 4
1.1History of railguns 4
1.2Theory behind it 5
1.3How a railgun works 6
1.4How a railgun would work on a military ship in the future 8
3. Research advances so far 9
3.1 A functional 32 MJ railgun weapon 9
3.2 Multi - shot salvos 10
4. Problems with a railgun 11
5. Different applications 12
5.1 Launch of spacecrafts into space from Earth 12
5.2 Military weapons 13
5.3 Fusion reaction initiations 14
5.3.1 How inertial confinement fusion should work 15
Conclusion 16
Used materials: 17

Introduction

With the advancement of technology ideas that used to be futuristic are nowadays already being researched with impressive headway made. One such research project is the railgun.
I picked this topic because railguns are a childhood dream of every kid who watched sci-fi movies or something related to space. I wanted to learn more about how they’re supposed to work and it is important because the research has done great leaps since 2009. Metaphorically it could be a crowbar used to break into a new military age in which the use of conventional guns changes drastically. And as a side effect new uses could be found in everyday life, not to mention the advancement in spacecraft related research.
The purpose of this essay is to explain what a railgun is and how it works along with a little history and the recent advancements in railgun related science .

What a railgun basically is

A railgun is an electrically powered electromagnetic projectile launcher and a large electric circuit , made up of three parts: a power source, a pair of parallel rails and a moving armature. Along the pair of parallel conducting rails a sliding armature is accelerated by the electromagnetic effects of a current that flows down one rail , into the armature and then back along the other rail. Railguns have long existed as experimental technology but the mass, size and cost of the required power supplies have prevented railguns from becoming practical military weapons.
However , in recent years , significant efforts have been made towards their development as feasible military technology. For example, in the late 2000s, the U.S. Navy tested a railgun that accelerates a 3.2 kg projectile to hypersonic velocities of approximately 2.4 kilometres per second, which is about Mach 7.
In addition to military applications, railguns have been proposed to launch spacecrafts into orbit ; however, unless the launching track was particularly long, and the acceleration required spread over a much longer time, such launches would be restricted to unmanned spacecraft.

History of railguns

The earliest electromagnetic gun developed was the coil gun, the