ABSTRACT

The concept of electromagnetic launch was first put forward by Colonel Dixon in “Newly Invented Electric Gun” (Driga et al., 1986), and many research institutions began to study the technology (Lee, 2005). In the 1980s, the American Science Application Company was able to accelerate a 100 kg object to 300 m/s (Dai et al., 2015), and the United States Navy successfully carried out launch tests that accelerated a 20 kg shell to 2.5 km/s at sea in 2004 (Huang et al., 2007). Thus, electromagnetic launching technology has many achievements in scientific research, but there were lots of challenging aspects, for example power supply and parameters, which restricted the further development of electromagnetic launchers.