Results of railgun experiments

During the 1979 Megagauss II conference the hypervelocity potential of railguns and the pulsed power technology needed to power them were discussed. Since then, many laboratories have initiated railgun R and D projects for a variety of potential applications. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories initiated a collaborative experimental railgun project which resulted in several successes in accelerating projectiles to high velocities, emphasized the limits on railgun operation, and indicated that the numerical modeling of railgun operation was in good agreement with the experiments.