Comparison between the Performance Analysis of Passive Compulsators with Slotted and Slotless Armature Windings Driving a Railgun

Abstract

Abstract Compulsators are AC generators which are specifically designed to maximize the current they can deliver for a given duration of time. A passive compulsator is being designed and developed as a source for a railgun which had been designed, fabricated and tested with a capacitor bank in the author’s laboratory. To minimize the internal impedance of compulsators, slotless armature windings are used instead of conventional slotted armature windings. For a constant mass of rotor, performance analysis of compulsator driving a railgun has been done for both slotted and slotless armature windings and the comparison is made between the projectile velocities, peak current, delivered energy density (DED) and stress on the conductor (in the case of slotless armature) between the two designs using flux-linkage or coupled circuit modeling of the system in this paper. From the analysis done using circuit modeling, two designs from both, slotted and slotless compulsators have been selected, such that both result in the same projectile velocity, and modeled and simulated in finite element method (FEM) based software to compute the tangential and radial stresses on the armature conductors as well the flux densities experienced by the conductors and the slots.