Compact Inductive Generator Applied to Railgun – CIGAR

Current pulsed power supplies (PPS) for applications as high magnetic field generation, electromagnetic forming or electromagnetic launchers are typically based on capacitive storage and therefore very bulky. In order to integrate a pulsed power generator in a mobile system, it is necessary to reduce the size and weight of such a generator. Due to its higher energy density compared to capacitors, inductive storage offers the possibility of remarkable size reduction. This proposal deals with an inductive XRAM generator which can be used to generate high power pulses at low inductive loads. The concept of an XRAM generator is to charge several inductances in series and discharged them in parallel to a load. By this, a limited charging current can be multiplied.
In this project, the ISL and the LNCMIpropose the setup of a 1 MJ XRAM generator in order to demonstrate the feasibility of this PPS for high energy/high power applications. The XRAM principle was successfully tested in earlier works at ISL with different setups. Now, this generator will be tested in combination with Li-ion batteries as primary energy source and a medium caliber railgun as load. Railgun experiments with supply currents up to 800 kA will be compared to experiments from the past which were performed with capacitor banks. Based on the experimental results, we will design a multiple megajoule XRAM generator for a railgun artillery system which will be able to launch projectiles with a mass of 5 kg to a distance of 200 km. The goal of this project is to verify the compactness of an inductive system with current multiplication compared to a capacitor based PPS and to show that such system can be mobile by size and weight estimation.