The barrel life of a solid armature rail gun is a critical issue. Arcing along the barrel pathway at the interfaces between the armature and the rails produces severe damage. The ability to protect the rails and yet provide sufficient electrical contact to sustain arc-free high-current flow is desirable. This thesis investigates the use of liquid metal as an interface material between the sliding electrical contact surfaces of the armature and the barrel rails. Experiments were conducted with the Naval Postgraduate Schoolαs 4-inch Rail Gun and liquid metal interface coatings were applied to the armatures. Results indicated that the liquid interface protects the rails and projectile surfaces for static electrical contact. Apparatus has been design to investigate sliding electrical contact between armature and rails in a controlled manner. New rails with a novel Adamy-Maier grooved rail design were fabricated to facilitate coating rails. Various groove patterns have been designed to control the current flow through the rails and across the interface surfaces, while maintaining lateral stability and interface integrity. These experiments are still in progress at the time of this writing. / US Navy (USN) author

Thesis (M.S. in Applied Physics) Naval Postgraduate School, December2001. / Thesis Advisor(s): Maier, II, William B. "December 2001." Includes bibliographical references (p. 25-29). Also available online.

Railguns undergo excessive wear between the projectile and the electromagnetic launcher rails due to the hypersonic relative motion and very large current density involved. The wear effects at the small-scale on the rail-armature interface are not well known but need to be examined in order to support the development of a multishot launcher. Proposed contact regimes in the surface asperity interactions include solidsolid contact, liquid-metal lubricated contact, and arcing. In the present work, a modified Mesoscale Friction Tester (MFT) equipped with a probe and substrate was used to investigate experimentally the arcing and friction conditions that the rail-armature interface would experience. Copper probes with a range of radii of curvature were electrochemically etched and polished to submicrometer roughness. The minimum electrode distances for arcing to occur was found in air at atmospheric pressure and led to a modified Paschen curve where field emission of electrons was the dominant physical mechanism as opposed to Townsend avalanche of ionized gas. Arcing erosion was studied by varying the current, number of strikes, dwell time, and nearest electrode positions horizontally and vertically. Copper-copper friction with a constant normal force resulted in reduced wear when applying a constant current between the electrodes. / text

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / 100 m/s). Low voltage electrical contact was not maintained for some experimental shots and non-parallel rails were the suspected cause. In this thesis, we used a non-contact capacitive sensor to determine rail spacing to within 2/kAcm10mael, so that the rails will be parallel within small tolerances. Several rails were used in these experiments: 75-25 copper-tungsten, chromium-plated 75-25 Cu-W, and chromium-plated pure copper rails. Improving the control of rail spacing and parallelity did not ensure low-voltage electrical contact for our configurations. The largest damage was observed for chromium-plated copper rails and the least damage occurred for chromium-plated 75-25 Cu-W rails. / Lieutenant, United States Navy

The development of high powered electro-magnetic devices has generated interest in the effect of combined electromagnetic and mechanical loading of such structures. Materials used in high-current applications – aluminum alloys and copper – are subjected to heat pulses of short duration (in the range of a few hundred microseconds to a few milliseconds); immediately following or along with such heat pulses, these materials are also subjected to large mechanical forces. In previous work reported in the literature, ejection of material from the vicinity of preexisting defects such as cracks, notches or discontinuities have been observed resulting from short-duration high-intensity current pulses; after a series of pulses, permanent deformation and weakening of intact material has also been reported. But a lack of complete understanding of the effects of short duration current pulses hinders the assessment of the reliability of such conductors in high energy applications. Therefore, an investigation was undertaken to examine the behavior of electromagnetically and mechanically loaded conductors. This work investigates the effects of short-duration, high-current-density pulses in combination with viii mechanical loading. The aim is to develop a theoretical model to describe the resulting mechanical response. The model is to provide a characterization of the possible effects of thermally-induced plastic strains on metals loaded beyond or just below their yield strength or below the critical stress intensity factor. In the experiments reported here, two types of specimens, undamaged and damaged, were subjected to combined electromechanical loads. Undamaged specimens were used to observe thermally-induced plastic strains - strains not caused by an increase in mechanical loading, but rather resulting from the reduction of yield strength and post-yield stiffness due to the increase in temperature. The experiments were conducted such that it would be possible to develop a model that would conclusively account for the observed material behavior. The second sets of specimens were weakened a priori by the introduction of a crack in order to study the influence of such crack-like defects on the electrical and mechanical fields, and to produce a safe design envelope with respect to the loading conditions. Failure was found to occur due to melting triggered by joule heating; a quantitative criterion based on current concentration and heat accumulation near the crack tip has been developed based on these experimental results. / text

This thesis derives working expressions from electromagnetic physical laws to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of railguns. The expressions are refined for ease of use and then compared to electromagnetic simulators that solve complex equations that arise from different rail geometry. Further simplifications lead to an expression for the final velocity of the projectile and showcase the importance of the system resistance to projectile flux gain ratio. A Simulink simulation then incorporates the resulting non-linear differential equations and approximates the projectile velocity over time based on physical dimensions and material properties. Some equations derived can be found in literature regarding the subject but often lack explanation. This work is intended to provide a thorough derivation of all the relative constituent relations between the critical characteristics of the gun such as the strength of the forces acting on the rail and projectile, rail current, and initial velocity of the projectile. This makes it easier to identify what influences acceleration of the projectile, how much bracing each rail needs, how much initial velocity to give the projectile, etc. Design options discussed besides the standard design include the augmented rail system, a magnetic shell design, and a “wrap around” design. The tradeoffs encountered in each design are discussed in length. Due to the lack of a sufficient power source during testing the projectile was unable to travel down the length of the rails due to metal binding, insufficient pulse duration, and too much circuit resistance. It was found that using copper tungsten for the rails ensures that the rails can withstand the arcing inflicted by the kilo-Ampere current along the rails very well compared to other materials. Also, the copper in the tungsten alloy ensures high conductivity while the tungsten provides structural integrity to the rails during arcing between them and the projectile. Frequency response of conductive projectiles is characterized and improvements such as laminated projectiles are suggested as solutions to mitigate eddy currents induced in the projectile and improve performance.