Modeling of Electromagnetic Railgun and Analysis of its Performance

Since railgun is an electro-mechanical system, it is not easy to simultaneously solve the electrical and mechanical equations. In this paper, a method based on a circuit model is presented for the analysis of the railgun, in which, its equivalent circuit is extracted and the differential equations describing its behavior are obtained. Using the 4th order Runge-Kutta method solution to theses equations, railgun simulation is performed. The main advantage of the proposed method is that due to its calculation speed, it can be easily used in the sensitivity analysis and design optimization, while these issues are almost impossible with finite element method, due to their slowness. Then, by employing the proposed method, the system has been simulated and its behavior has been studied. Also, the effect of the railgun structural parameters’ variations on the velocity, efficiency and force applied to the armature has been investigated. To validate the proposed method, the point to point 3-D finite element method is employed. The results of the finite element method are close enough to the results of the proposed method, confirming the accuracy of the latter.