Performance Analysis of Reluctance Coil Launchers Driven by Distributed Feeder Circuit

Abstract

Reluctance coil launchers usually use a pulse current formed by capacitive discharge to excite the excitation coil when launching. The pulse current peaks are high, and the projectile usually undergoes deep magnetic saturation, resulting in low launching efficiency. To address this problem, this article proposes using distributed feeder circuit to drive reluctance coil launchers, replacing the traditional single set of large-capacity capacitor discharge scheme with multiple small-capacity capacitors discharged in a time-sequential manner, so as to reduce the peak current and suppress magnetic saturation problems. The study includes two main aspects, one is to study the effect of the driving method on the launch performance and analyze the reasons; the other is to propose the calculation of the time-varying data in the launch process by the time-segmented calculation method. The efficiency of the model described in the paper is only 1.301% when using a single high-capacity capacitor for launching, while the launching efficiency is increased to 3.535% when driven by the distributed feeder circuit, indicating that the method can effectively improve the launching performance.INDEX TERMS Reluctance coil launcher, magnetic saturation, distributed feeder circuit, flat-topped wave current, time-segmented calculation method.