SLINGSHOT - a Coilgun Design Code

The Sandia coilgun [1,2,3,4,5] is an inductive electromagnetic launcher. It consists of a sequence of powered, multi-turn coils surrounding a flyway of circular cross-section through which a conducting armature passes. When the armature is properly positioned with respect to a coil, a charged capacitor is switched into the coil circuit. The rising coil currents induce a current in the armature, producing a repulsive accelerating force. The basic numerical tool for modeling the coilgun is the SLINGSHOT code, an expanded, user-friendly successor to WARP-10 [6]. SLINGSHOT computes the currents in the coils and armature, finds the forces produced by those currents, and moves the armature through the array of coils. In this approach, the cylindrically symmetric coils and armature are subdivided into concentric hoops with rectangular cross-section, in each of which the current is assumed to be uniform. The ensemble of hoops are treated as coupled circuits. The specific heats and resistivities of the hoops are found as functions of temperature and used to determine the resistive heating. The code calculates the resistances and inductances for all hoops, and the mutual inductances for all hoop pairs. Using these, it computes the hoop currents from their circuit equations, finds the forces from the products of these currents and the mutual inductance gradient, and moves the armature. Treating the problem as a set of coupled circuits is a fast and accurate approach compared to solving the field equations. Its use, however, is restricted to problems in which the symmetry dictates the current paths. This paper is divided into three parts. The first presents a demonstration of the code. The second describes the input and output. The third part describes the physical models and numerical methods used in the code. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with coilguns