Magnetic Propulsion for a Hypervelocity Launcher

The concept of using electromagnetic forces to launch projectiles to high-velocity has been pursued since the laws of electro-motion were first derived by Oersted and Ampere in the early 1800's. During the l 960's, there were a number of attempts to develop practical hypervelocity accelerators using electro-magnetic forces. These investigations did not meet with notable success [1,2]. There has been greatly increased interest in electromagnetic propulsion in recent years for a variety of applications including hypervelocity weapons, meteoroid simulation at impact velocities above 10 km/s, high pressure shock physics, and space propulsion. This paper describes an electromagnetic launcher which was developed at the Australian National University (ANU) in the early 1970's, [3] and was successfully used to accelerate projectiles to hypervelocities [4].