International railgun modeling effort

The international rail gun modeling community-which includes participants from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States-is seeking to harmonize national electrical gun simulation codes. The EMAP3D, developed at the Institute for Advanced Technology, was chosen as the U.S. code for the modeling effort. Electromagnetic simulations are performed based on a common problem: shot 18 of the U.S. 25-mm square bore rail gun with an MCA103 armature. The simulation results from participating nations were compared. In this paper, only the U.S. simulation is presented. Numerical results-including current density, magnetic field, temperature, and driving body force density-from simulations with stationary armature and with moving armature are presented along with a discussion of velocity skin effects.