Is a railgun a particle accelerator?

A plasma railgun is a linear accelerator which, like a projectile railgun, uses two long parallel electrodes to accelerate a “sliding short” armature. However, in a plasma railgun, the armature and ejected projectile consists of plasma, or hot, ionized, gas-like particles, instead of a solid slug of material.

Can plasma be a projectile?

A plasma cannon (also called an electrothermal accelerator) is an experimental projectile weapon, which accelerates a projectile by means of a plasma discharge between electrodes at the rear of the barrel, generating a rapid increase in pressure.

How fast can a railgun accelerate?

5,400 miles an hour
Railguns use magnetic fields created by high electrical currents to accelerate a projectile to Mach 6, or 5,400 miles an hour. The velocity is sufficient to give the EMRG an effective range of 110 nautical miles, or 126 miles on land.

Why do some hypervelocity research projects use railguns?

In some hypervelocity research projects, projectiles are ‘pre-injected’ into railguns, to avoid the need for a standing start, and both two-stage light-gas guns and conventional powder guns have been used for this role.

Could a railgun be used to launch an aircraft to space?

In addition to military applications, NASA has proposed to use a railgun to launch “wedge-shaped aircraft with scramjets” to high-altitude at Mach 10, where they will then fire a small payload into orbit using conventional rocket propulsion.

What are the advantages of railguns over cannons?

Current railgun technologies necessitate a long and heavy barrel, but a railgun’s ballistics far outperform conventional cannons of equal barrel lengths. Railguns can also deliver area of effect damage by detonating a bursting charge in the projectile which unleashes a swarm of smaller projectiles over a large area.

How is the driving force of a railgun determined?

For a more workable simple model, a useful alternative is to use a lumped circuit model, to describe the relationship between the driving current and the railgun force. In these models the railgun is modeled on an electrical circuit and the driving force can be determined from the energy flow in the circuit.