SBIR-STTR Award

The Navys significant investment in the electromagnetic railgun program has proven to advance the technology to a point where shipboard integration and operational challenges must be addressed. One of these remaining challenges is providing a reliable electrical connection at the breech of the gun to allow training, elevation, and recoil of the large and powerful launcher. In response to this SBIR topic and considering the many challenges associated with a high voltage, high current, actively cooled, flexible gun breech, the BT/CEM proposes an innovative laminated parallel plate bus design with pivoting joints to provide elevation and training movement. The BT/CEM has over 30 years of directly related experience developing railguns and their associated power supplies and buswork including both laminated and coaxial cable bus. While members of the BT/CEM team have extensive experience designing, fabricating, and testing electrical bus systems with mega-amp current levels, this Navy SBIR topic has the added complexity of requiring relative motion as well as active cooling of the articulating bus structure.

Benefit:
The proposed effort will result in the preliminary design for a flexible, cooled, high current electrical EM launcher breech interface. The design will be optimized to minimize mass and volume and still meet the Navy requirements for discharge rate. The proposing team will use their experience transferring technology to industry to help ensure success for the Navy and the team will investigate other potential applications such as high current joints for pulsed resistance welding of large steel bridge girders.

Keywords:
EM launcher breech connection, EM launcher breech connection, electric launcher, Railgun, flexible electrical bus, cooled electrical bus, high current density electrical bus