Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

A decade of railgun development for high pressure research

Conference ·
OSTI ID:6842595

This paper summarizes a decade of effort towards development of railguns into useful high pressure tools. In 1942 the first successful railgun accelerated a 10-g projectile to about 1 km/s, and in the 1960's velocities approaching 10 km/s were achieved, but without verification of projectile integrity. Later work at the Australian National University showed the potential of railguns to launch intact projectiles. About 10 years ago efforts began to develop railguns for a variety of purposes, including high pressure shock wave equation-of-state (EOS) research. Problems and their causes in this research are now more clearly understood and efforts are being made to develop the railgun into a hypervelocity EOS tool.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (USA)
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-48
OSTI ID:
6842595
Report Number(s):
UCRL-99246; CONF-8809109-5; ON: DE88017024
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

Similar Records

Railguns for equation-of-state research
Conference · Thu Jun 18 00:00:00 EDT 1981 · OSTI ID:6236980

Railgun accelerators for gram-sized projectiles
Conference · Wed Oct 01 00:00:00 EDT 1980 · OSTI ID:7101575

Projectile development for railguns using hypervelocity preacceleration
Technical Report · Thu Mar 19 23:00:00 EST 1992 · OSTI ID:5019023