Award

Use of electromagnetic energy to accelerate payloads has significant advantages over conventional methods such as chemical propellant, steam, or compressed air. Systems can be safer, lower wear, lower maintenance and can potentially achieve higher velocities than conventional methods. Tailoring of launch velocities and launch velocity profiles over a wide range is also readily done.The key to effective electromagnetic launchers is the creation, conversion, and delivery of extremely high peak powers (in the multi-megawatt to multi-gigawatt range) to the payload in a safe, reliable, long lived, and efficient manner. The coil gun approach being developed by DTI under this SBIR can meet these goals; there is none of the high current sliding contact associated with railgun power delivery; therefore the launcher (barrel and coils) can be built to have minimal (theoretically near-zero) wear. Solid state electronics and modern energy storage capacitors have the potential for long lives as well.DTI is advancing this technology in two categories, heavy payloads accelerated to modest velocities and light payloads to high (supersonic / hypersonic) velocities.