Application-Based General Scaling in Railguns

When it comes to scaling railguns, there is no best or one-size-fits-all methodology. It is important for the researcher to be able to choose the appropriate scaling methods to best match the application in an experiment. This paper is an overview of railgun scaling methods; the generic railgun equations are tailored to obtain suitable methods for applications involving circuits, kinematics, fields, thermal control, and mechanics. These methods can be applied to the power supply of the gun, the gun itself, or both, depending on the nature of the investigation. The scaling methods of previous literature are reviewed and expanded upon, and scaling based on circuit modeling is presented, simulated, and tested with experiment.