Abstract
The new concept of accelerating a body flying in a tube at supersonic speed by self-synchronized ignition of an explosive gas mixture, the ram accelerator, has generated considerable interest during the last years in different countries. The great advantage of this novel propulsion principle when compared to the classical interior ballistics, is explained in Fig. 1. In a powder gun, the energy is released at one end of the tube. As a consequence, the pressure at the base of the projectile quickly decreases with its increasing velocity and decays to only a few percent of the initial pressure in the powder chamber when it has reached about 2000 m/s. In ram acceleration, the projectile behaves like a surfboard riding on a wave, it is continuously accelerated by the combustion generated overpressure at its rear end.
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Smeets, G. (1997). The Ram Accelerator: Perspectives and Experimental Results Already Achieved. In: Champion, M., Deshaies, B. (eds) IUTAM Symposium on Combustion in Supersonic Flows. Fluid Mechanics and Its Applications, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5432-1_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5432-1_18
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