Effect of pulse forming network parameters on efficiency of electromagnetic launch system

A PSpice model of electromagnetic launch(EML) system was built up for the distributed energy store(DES) powered railgun. The pulsed power supply adopts the capacitor-based pulse forming network(PFN), which is widely-used in railgun systems. The railgun model takes consideration of many nonlinear factors caused by the movement of armature. During simulation, various parameters were applied to calculate the efficiency of the EML system, including capacitance and initial voltage of capacitor bank, inductance of pulse forming inductor, intervals of crowbar switches, parameters of pulse forming units and so on. Through comparison and analysis, several methods to raise the efficiency of the EML system were acquired. The simulation results show that, for given amature mass and accelerating distan