Experimental comparison of conventional and trans-augmented railguns

A 2.4-m-long, 1-cm-diameter round bore railgun was constructed to perform careful experiments which compared the performance of conventional and transaugmented plasma armature railguns. Conventional railgun experiments were performed over a range of currents to characterize the base performance of the railgun and to provide data for the development of ablation drag and thermal propulsive models. Experiments were then performed for a range of (separately powered) augmentation currents but with railgun currents equal to those used in the conventional experiments. The enhanced performance provided by augmentation was found to be significantly less than predicted by theory, even though the railgun operated without the formation of secondary armatures or restrikes