PROJECT TITLE :

Diagnostics for Kinematics on MTF at NRL

ABSTRACT:

The Material Take a look at Facility (MTF) houses a medium-caliber electromagnetic (EM) railgun that is designed for ease of access. As such, it is ideal for developing diagnostics for measuring the performance of EM launchers. Multiple in situ diagnostics have been fielded on the MTF railgun together with field sensors for position location and thermal sensors. Kinematics of the launch package are of explicit interest. B-dot loops are the usual method, but several such B-dots are needed to obtain a close evolution of position and velocity. This requires many channels and consumes knowledge acquisition resources. Naval Analysis Lab (NRL) has developed many versions of a flux ladder diagnostic, which include many pick-up loops on one knowledge channel. Some versions have multiple flux ladders interleaved to take care of pulse separation in a single channel, but that increase the spatial resolution. A typical MTF configuration has fifty eight positions monitored in simply three channels. Careful processing has yielded velocity and even acceleration. NRL is additionally developing a flux loop diagnostic that has the potential for continuous kinematics with the time resolution of the digital sampling rate. But, flux loops are additional sensitive to spurious signal sources. Preliminary flux loop results are presented.