Experiments to Increase the Used Energy With the PEGASUS Railgun

The French-German Research Institute (ISL) has several railguns installed, the largest of these is the PEGASUS accelerator. It is a 6-m long, 4 × 4-cm2 caliber distributed energy supply railgun. It has a 10-MJ capacitor bank as energy supply attached to it. In the past, this installation was used to accelerate projectiles with a mass of about 300 g to velocities up to 2500 m/s. In the ongoing investigation, it is attempted to accelerate heavier projectiles to velocities above 2000 m/s. For this, a new type of projectile including a payload section was developed. In this paper, the results of the experiments with payload projectiles using a primary energy between 3.8 and 4.8 MJ are discussed.