On railguns. A thesis for a degree,
"An investigation of the static force balance of a model railgun", thesis Naval Postgraduate School, Maier, William B.
"..."...An interesting debate in railgun research circles is the location, magnitude, and cause of recoil forces, equal and opposite to the launched projectile. The various claims do not appear to be supported by direct experimental observation. The goal of this research paper is to develop an experiment to observe the balance of forces in a model railgun in a static state. ..."
"...a reaction to the rails or power source.
By suspending a model railgun as a pendulum and mechanically decoupling the
power supply from the rails via a liquid metal contact we were able to precisely record
the force on a mechanically coupled rail-and-armature system with a known current. We
then decoupled the rails from the power supply and the armature, fixed the armature to
the table, and precisely recorded the reaction force.
With current at 2200A in our model gun the theoretical force on the armature
(using Kerrisk’s L’ of 0.895µH/m) was 2.16N yet the reaction force on the rails was less
than we could measure (with sensitivities as low as 0.024N). Thus, the magnitude of the
theoretical force on the armature was at least two orders of magnitude greater than the
recoil..."
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