Electro Magnetic Rail Gun

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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-9863174-42.html

Rail gun uses kinetic energy to deliver Mach 5 wallop

The U.S. Navy is installing an electro-magnetic laboratory rail gun at its Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., bringing it one step closer to developing a ship-mounted version of this futuristic cannon.

The 32-megajoule weapon appears to be the largest rail gun ever built, according to defense contractor BAE Systems. A joule is what's needed to produce one watt of energy for one second.

It uses a magnetic "rail" instead of a chemical propellant like gunpowder to heave projectiles at Mach 7 for what could be up to 220 miles down range--that's 10 times farther than what contemporary naval guns. The projectile hits at Mach 5, destroying the target with kinetic energy instead of conventional explosives.

Ship building and design are expected to benefit should the new gun prove feasible, mainly because new vessels won't be forced to haul tons of explosives. But while the rail gun uses no gunpowder, it can hardly be called energy efficient. A planned 64-megajoule system would suck around 6 million amps.

In addition to developing new onboard capacitors or pulsed alternators to power the weapon, the Navy must come up with new materials to secure the gun, firing it can dislodge the conducting rails--or even rip the gun barrel apart, according to some reports. The Navy, which has already tested smaller versions, as seen in the video, wants a rail gun onboard a ship as early as 2020.
 
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Frequently Asked Questions: Electromagnetic Railgun

http://www.onr.navy.mil/emrg/faqs-electromagnetic-railgun.asp

Frequently Asked Questions: Electromagnetic Railgun

Q1. What is a railgun and how does it work?
A1. An electromagnetic railgun uses electrical energy to accelerate projectiles to extreme velocities. Railguns do not require chemical propellants to fire the round or explosives to create an explosive effect on impact -- thereby freeing magazine space for other mission areas or additional projectiles. The high-velocity kinetic impact of the round is so great that even a solid metal round can have an explosive effect. In addition, electromagnetic guns provide a highly consistent and uniform propulsion that allows for much greater accuracy.

Q2. Why is this technology being pursued by the Navy?
A2. The system has the potential to provide responsive, long-range, accurate, high-volume naval surface fire support to U.S. Marine Corps units. It also is envisioned that railguns will also be able to engage surface targets in direct-fire mode. It is estimated that a railgun will be able to fire 6 to 10 rounds per minute. The railgun will offer numerous advantages over conventional naval gunfire systems. Most important is an extremely long range, which could extend more than 200 nautical miles. The current Mk 45 5-inch/54 naval gunfire system currently used for naval surface fire support has a maximum range of slightly more than 13 nautical miles.

Q3. At what stage is the Navy’s railgun program in development?
A3. The Navy’s railgun program is currently in the science and technology phase of development. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has program lead at this stage of development.

Q4. Are there any prototypes in development?
A4. BAE Systems and General Atomics are currently under contract with ONR as part of the Innovative Naval Prototype Program. Under this 30-month phase, BAE Systems and General Atoms are taking the state-of-the-art electromagnetic railgun technologies through technology maturation and developing a 32-MJ railgun. Thirty-two megajules is equivalent to a firing speed in the range of Mach 7 or seven times the speed of sound. This will be an intermediate step on the road to a 64-MJ Tactical System capable of deployment on board naval surface combatant ships. Delivery of the BAE system was in September 2007.

Q5. How long before a weapon system is fielded in the fleet?
A5. It is estimated that is would take at least another 15 years to field a viable railgun weapon system in the fleet.

Q6. What are some of the advantages of railguns?
A6. Railguns offer numerous advantages over conventional naval artillery:

* Extended range – Railguns ultimately will be capable of engaging targets at distances in excess of 200 nautical miles. Currently, the Mk 45 5-inch/45 naval gunfire system has a range of slightly more than 13 nautical miles.
* Higher velocity – Railgun rounds will achieve hypersonic speeds in excess of mach 7 (5,550 miles per hour). Railguns can provide more responsive fires than current naval gunfire systems, cruise missiles, or aircraft on strip alert.
* Safer ammunition handling – Without the need for explosive propellants or warheads, there is no danger of accidental explosions during ammunition loading and magazine storage.
* More rounds aboard ship – Because railguns eliminate the need for explosive propellants, logistics for the weapons system is greatly simplified. The additional space can be used for additional rounds or for other uses in the ship. This means a ship can stay on station longer, providing fire support for ground forces ashore.
* High angle of trajectory - Because railguns can fire into the stratosphere, they have a high angle of fire that allows them to engage targets on the reverse slopes of hills and mountains along the gun target line. This is an advantage over current naval surface support systems, which have relatively flat fire trajectories and consequently have a very limited capability to engage targets on reverse slopes in defilade.

Q7. What are the specific technological applications or material that allow railguns to work?
A7. We cannot discuss specific technical details for reasons of national security and classification.

Q8. How do railgun projectiles destroy their targets?
A8. Railgun projectiles destroy targets by kinetic energy only. The tremendous velocity of the round on impact releases enough kinetic energy that explosive rounds are not necessary. This prevents the danger of dud rounds being left in place after a battle that would endanger civilian population after the conflict has ended.

Q9. What is the Navy’s budget for railgun development? How much has it cost already?
A9. The total budget for ONR’s Innovative Naval Prototype railgun program currently is $237 million from FY 06-FY-11.

Q10. What types of targets can the EMRG be deployed against?
A10. Currently, plans call for developing three different rounds for the EMRG: a unitary round for engaging “hard” targets such as prepared positions, bunkers, and buildings; a rod-dispensing round for vehicle targets; and a pellet-dispensing round for personnel targets.

Q11: What are the Navy’s partners on this project?
A11. The primary partners are:

* BAE
* Boeing
* Charles Stark Draper Lab, Inc.
* General Atomics
* Department of Energy (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
* U.S. Naval Academy
* Naval Postgraduate School
* Naval Sea Systems Command (PMS 500)
* NAWC -- Rhode Island
* NSWC -- Carderock
* NSWC -- Dahlgren
* The United Kingdom

Q12: Is this system being developed for any specific future naval platform?
A12. No. With the planned timeframe of having a deployable weapon system by 2020-2025, we are working on understanding railgun system impacts for ships of different sizes. Integration could occur on new vessels or by retrofitting on existing platforms.

Q13. What are the major scientific hurdles to making such a weapon possible?
A13. The most important developments that will take place during the lifetime of the railgun Innovative Naval Prototype program fall into four key categories: the materials that will comprise the bore and containment system of the launcher; the projectiles; the pulsed-power network; and ship integration.

Q14. Will the projectile have any internal guidance system?
A14. Yes, the projectile will have a guidance system.

Q15. How does the gun’s power (range/velocity) compare with common weapons used for the same general purpose?
A15. See diagram showing comparison with current and historical naval guns. Compare with SR-71 (mach 3.5 maximum -- 2,500 mph) and launch of the Space Shuttle (two minutes into the ascent, the space shuttle is about 45 kilometers [28 miles] above the earth's surface and is traveling nearly 5000 kilometers per hour [3,000 mph]).

Q16. If, when a railgun fires, an electromagnetic pulse is emitted, how will that affect people and equipment around it?
A16. All DoD and industry-standard safety procedures for electromagnetic radiation are currently in place at our test facilities to protect personnel and equipment. Although it is likely that an operational shipboard system would be unmanned, we are closely monitoring electromagnetic emissions and will continue to do so throughout the life of the program to understand better the effects in a future shipboard environment.

Q17. Without any kind of warhead, how will a non-explosive projectile cause any real damage?
A17. With an impact speed of Mach 5, a projectile will use kinetic energy alone to destroy a target. In essence, damage is caused by the thousands of fragments -- each one of them traveling at lethal velocities -- created by the impact of each projectile.
 
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http://www.pennwellblogs.com/mae/2008/01/electromagnetic-railguns-and-high-power.html


Electromagnetic railguns and high-power electronics: you ain't seen nothin' yet

Monday, January 28, 2008

Posted by John Keller

There's just no way to understate the military's future need for high-power electronics. Electric-drive vehicles, all-electric aircraft, and aircraft carrier catapults are just some of the potential applications.

Yet the emergence of electromagnetic railguns has raised the bar dramatically for high-power electronics. The U.S. Navy plans to use these weapons aboard future surface warships to shoot non-explosive shells at a speed of Mach 8 -- eight times the speed of sound, or roughly 6,000 miles per hour.

At that speed you don't need explosives; the kinetic energy alone is enough to make vehicle-size objects disappear in balls of fire. Forget artillery shells and missiles. Fire an electromagnetic railgun at a target 10 miles away and the projectile gets there in less than six seconds. That's not much time to react. You'd never hear it coming; you'd be lucky even to see it.

Now get this: the Navy wants electromagnetic railguns with ranges of hundreds of miles. Shot a target 200 miles away and the projectile gets there in about two minutes. A Harpoon anti-ship missile would take about 22 minutes to fly that far. It's not hard to see how batteries of electromagnetic railguns -- especially those that could fire rapidly -- might be able to overwhelm enemy air defenses very quickly.

Believe this is science fiction? Think again. The Office of Naval Research has taken delivery of a functional, 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun from BAE Systems, and the gun will be demonstrated this week at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va. The Navy envisions 64-megajoule electromagnetic railguns for future shipboard use.

The difficulty of deploying future electromagnetic railguns might not lie in the technology necessary to build these weapons, but in producing the incredibly large amounts of electricity necessary to operate them.

Think of the kind of electromagnetic railgun the Navy wants for future warships. It takes 64 megajoules to shoot it. That's equal to about 18 kilowatt hours, or about the same amount of power an average American household uses in an entire day. Those future warships carrying these kinds of weapons are going to need amazing power plants.

Think of the generators that will be necessary to operate the electromagnetic railgun. This requirement for electricity production is likely to have a profound influence over future ship design.

It looks like the designers of high-power electronics and components have their work cut out for them. Ready or not, industry, the Navy is going to need a lot of electrical power, and very soon. We wouldn't want those electromagnetic rail guns to be all dressed up and have nowhere to plug them in. video

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Blogger Jim Essig said...
This rail gun is a defense paradigm changing technology.

In theory, the absolute limiting value of electromagnetically launched projectiles is the speed of light or C. Obviously, according to special relativity, attainment of C for a projectile of finite rest mass would require infinite energy input. However given the absolute limits of C and infinite kinetic energy, there is lots of room for electromagnetic gun technology to improve.

Some theories that hold that there are absolute limits to the intensity of electric and magnetic field hold that such fields can achieve a maximum strength of about 10 EXP 55 Volts/meter and about 10 EXP 55 Tesla respectively. At these field levels, one cubic meter of space occupied by such a field would contain an electrical or magnetic energy 10 EXP 30 times greater than the entire mass energy content within the visible universe. Field levels greater than these in a pure vacuum might accordingly cause the vacuum to break down into single magnetic pole particles such as monopoles and perhaps other bazaar entities.

On a much more practical note, electromagnetic guns that would use solenoid highly conducting carbon nanotube materials with tensile strengths exceeding mild grade construction steel by a factor of 60 might enable magnetically propelled hardened steel projectile to reach tens of kilometers per second. The extreme tensile strength of these carbon nanotube materials might permit magnetic field strengths into the hundreds of Teslas in a repeatable manner.

In short, electromagnetic guns are an awesome technology. In a world where enemies of freedom would like to take down the U.S. and its allies, I see no problem morally with developing such systems, improving them, and deploying them. The horrible news about how Alqueda probably conned two innocent mentally retarded Iraqi women to carry bomb vests packed with dynamite and ball bearings which were detonated remotely to kill scores or market goers only reinforces my opinion for our need to keep a technological edge on our ruthless adversaries. We can aim for the ultimate goal of disarmament but even the late great Pope John Paul II said it is not practical nor feasible for the U.S. to disarm unilaterally. Our enemies certainly will not
 
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Electromagnetic Railgun | Popular Science

Electromagnetic Railgun
A kinetic missile that flies at mach 7
By Eric Adams Posted 06.01.2004 at 3:25 pm 3 Comments





by John Macneill: Projectiles fired from an electromagnetic railgun will travel up to 290 miles in less than six minutes, exiting the atmosphere before hurling into their target at a velocity of 5,000 feet per second. The force of the impact will obliterate targets without an explosive aid. John Macneill
View Photo Gallery

Picture this: A massive destroyer receives the location coordinates of an enemy headquarters more than 200 miles away. Instead of launching a million-dollar Tomahawk cruise missile, it points a gun barrel in the direction of the target, diverts electric power from the ship’s engine to the gun turret, and launches a 3-foot-long, 40-pound projectile up a set of superconducting rails. The projectile leaves the barrel at hypersonic velocity—Mach 7-plus—exits the Earth’s atmosphere, re-enters under satellite guidance, and lands on the building less than six minutes later; its incredible velocity vaporizes the target with kinetic energy alone.


The U.S. Navy is developing an electromagnetic railgun that will turn destroyers into super-long-range machine guns—able to fire up to a dozen relatively inexpensive projectiles every minute. The Navy is collaborating with the British Ministry of Defence, which has a similar effort under way. In 2003, its facility in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, hosted a 1/8-scale test of an electromagnetic railgun that produced stable flight in a projectile fired out of the barrel at Mach 6. But Capt. Roger McGinnis, program manager for directed energy weapons at Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C., estimates the U.S. version won’t be “deliverable” until 2015 at the earliest.


The technology behind the electromagnetic railgun has been around for more than 20 years, but early efforts wilted because of the huge power requirements: No ship could generate or store enough electricity to fire the gun. The concept was revived a few years ago when the Navy announced plans for its next-generation battleship, the all-electric DD(X). “In the past, destroyers had 90 percent of their power tied to propulsion,” explains McGinnis. “But with DD(X), you can divert the power to whatever you need. We can stop the ship and fire the railgun as many times as we need, then divert the power back to the screws.”

The barrel of the electromagnetic railgun will contain two parallel conducting rails about 20 feet long, bridged by a sliding armature. In the current design, electric current travels up one rail, crosses the armature, and heads down the second rail. The loop induces a magnetic field that pushes the armature, and the projectile aboard it, up the rails.


The challenges that remain include ensuring that the gun can target enemy sites with precision, and creating equipment that can withstand the gargantuan pressures the gun will create. “Right now, guns are only as accurate as the targeting of the bore, and now we’re talking about 200-plus-mile ranges, so there has to be aerodynamic correction,” says Fred Beach, the assistant program manager for the electromagnetic railgun at Naval Sea Systems Command. The projectile, he says, will receive course correction information from satellites and will steer itself with movable control surfaces. And because the projectile will be subjected to up to 45,000 Gs during firing, the onboard electronics must be strengthened to withstand the acceleration. Forces inside the gun itself—particularly getting the armature to move easily within the system—are also challenging the designers. “Getting two pieces of metal to slide past each other is pretty hard—we’re getting a lot of damage to the rails,” Beach says.


The electromagnetic railgun’s projectiles will cover 290 miles in six minutes—initially traveling 8,200 feet per second and hitting their target at 5,000 feet per second. Current Navy guns, which shoot powder-ignited explosive shells, have a maximum range of 12 miles and, because they are unguided, are difficult to aim. Though guided missiles, the current long-range alternative for destroyers, can achieve ranges comparable to that of the electromagnetic railgun, their cost and storage problems are what’s driving the efforts to find an alternative. Ships can only carry up to 70 guided missiles and must return to port to restock because the missiles cannot be loaded at sea, whereas railgun projectiles can easily be loaded at sea, and by the hundreds. Also appealing is that the electromagnetic railgun’s missiles do not contain volatile explosives; the weapon does its work with kinetic energy.
 

Pintu

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A great update LF Sir, very nice find,

Please continue,

Regards
 

Daredevil

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Interesting technology I should say. Can this kind of technology be also used in Artillery/Tankers etc?.
 

Payeng

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Interesting technology I should say. Can this kind of technology be also used in Artillery/Tankers etc?.
Err not the same technology but ever heard of Project Babylon supergun?

If ever it had been developed the gun would be able to fire 600 kg projectile to a range of 1,000 kilometers, or a 2,000 kg rocket-assisted projectile into orbit.

wasn't that worthy piece of artillery for an army?

A picture of the Babylon or a Baby Babylon supergun
 

Pintu

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Yes , Payeng, I have read about it.

Project Babylon Super Gun was based on Project HARP(High Altitude Research Program) led by the Canadian Scientist Gerald Bull(Source: Wikipedia) however, it was with Former Iraqi President Saddam Husein's enthusiasm Project Babylon started. The project ran from 1988-1990 after Gerald Bull(1928-1990) assassinated, it was halted. Iraqis allowed UN inspectors to destroy it during disarmament process. I think there were two versions Big Babylon and Baby Babylon. Big Babylon was more likely a space gun based on Project HARP, where as Baby Babylon it was estimated that a range of 750 km.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon

Sections of Project Babylon image courtesy Wikipedia:



Regards
 

Pintu

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A Picture of Project Harp test fired( it was led by Gerald Bull)

Image courtesy Wikipedia:



Regards
 

khatarnak

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Electromagnetic Rail gun

i have read in a science magazine (scope - if i remember) before about a decade or so, that india has tried to develop indigenous gun on the basis of magnet technology as the japanese bullet train is running. + and - pole technology. i never heard anything then after about it.

i want opinion of you guys that whether the principle can be used or not??
 

SATISH

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but can the artillery shell gain enough momentum when it is fired as much as conventional one?...And where will you get the power from?
 

Martian

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The railgun is still being developed. It will take at least another decade to solve the power and engineering problems. See Navy 'Rail Gun' Moves Forward

"A ship-based rail gun is presently being targeted for the 2020 to 2024 ... “electric ships” such as the next-generation destroyer DDG(1000)"
 

khatarnak

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but can the artillery shell gain enough momentum when it is fired as much as conventional one?...And where will you get the power from?
the power can be generated on a simple principle. the same as bulet train is running. JUST TO UNDERSTAND AND SCIETIFICALLY NOT SO PRICISE.......... we have A.C. current electricity. it has up and down wavelength. + and - poles can be generated by electricity supply to magnet. suppose when the wavelength is upside, magnet has + pole and when down side, it has - pole. when a + pole of barrel comes near to - pole of the shell, it creates attraction between them. and the same time current passes through and wavelength is changing from up to down so - pole is generated. now the - pole of barrel comes behind the -pole of shell. which pushes the shell further outside the barrel.

infact, imo, it can generate more speed and can fire the shell at far distance means large range.
 

SATISH

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the power can be generated on a simple principle. the same as bulet train is running. JUST TO UNDERSTAND AND SCIETIFICALLY NOT SO PRICISE.......... we have A.C. current electricity. it has up and down wavelength. + and - poles can be generated by electricity supply to magnet. suppose when the wavelength is upside, magnet has + pole and when down side, it has - pole. when a + pole of barrel comes near to - pole of the shell, it creates attraction between them. and the same time current passes through and wavelength is changing from up to down so - pole is generated. now the - pole of barrel comes behind the -pole of shell. which pushes the shell further outside the barrel.

infact, imo, it can generate more speed and can fire the shell at far distance means large range.
Where will you get the power from?
 

natarajan

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Is it developed by india or they going to use in future ,if not then it should go to world weapons watch.Is't it
 
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I had started a thread on this long back. http://www.defenceforum.in/forum/bo...ses-kinetic-energy-deliver-mach-5-wallop.html. US navy is currently working on a rail gun which will reach MACH 7, a lot of power is needed for the rail guns since they work onn electromagnetism. The navy is expected to receive the guns around 2020.
The force of a 3.2kg projectile fired from a rail gun will be equivalent to hitting a target with a car(ford taurus sized) at 380mph.
 

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