This 'mass driver' type machine only fires pellets at present and seems to
be intended as a weapon. But it can fire projectiles faster than escape
velocity with relatively gentle acceleration, so, if they increase the
projectile size big enough to be containers, why not use it to resupply
space stations? Lots of small containers soon equal the payload of a
resupply rocket.
But I suppose you've got the problem of catching them at the receiving
end....
And you wouldn't want anything to get in the way of the delivery stream
either...
Regards, BillK
PS. And, No Mike - you can't have one for perimeter defence. :-)
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http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/flyer.htm
Magnetic field shocklessly shoots pellets 20 times faster than rifle bullet
For orbiting satellites, equations of state, kinetic kill weapons
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A magnetic field that accelerates pellets faster than
anything except a nuclear explosion has been developed experimentally at the
Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories.
The machine that generates the field has been jokingly dubbed "the fastest
gun in the West," but the description is an understatement.
"It's the fastest gun in the world," says Sandia physicist Marcus Knudson,
lead scientist on the project. The propulsion speed of 20 km/sec - almost
three times that necessary to escape the gravitational pull of the Earth
(about 7 km/sec) - would send material from New York to Boston in half a
minute, and from Albuquerque to Santa Fe in a few seconds. A rifle bullet is
typically propelled at 1 km/sec.
The machine, Sandia's Z accelerator, currently propels dime-sized pellets
called flyer plates only a few hundred millimeters to gain information on
the effect of high-velocity impacts. The data gained can be used to simulate
the effect of flying space junk impacting the metal skin of an orbiting
observatory traveling in the opposite direction. The data is expected to aid
materials scientists trying to balance lightness against strength for
satellite and observatory shells.
The technique also has potential as a hypervelocity "kinetic kill" weapon
that, emanating from a lighter, more mobile source than the huge Z machine,
still could strike disabling blows through an adversary's heavy armor. These
more mobile sources are already in development. Perhaps most importantly,
though least dramatically, the technique is the fastest, most accurate, and
cheapest method to determine how materials will react under high pressures
and temperatures. These characteristics can then be expressed in formulas
called "equations of state" - equations that tell researchers precisely how
materials will react if basic conditions like pressure and temperature are
changed by specific amounts.
The propulsion technique works by applying the Z machine's 20 million amps
to produce an evolving magnetic field that expands in approximately 200
nanoseconds to reach several million atmospheres pressure. The relatively
gentle acceleration produced by the field is similar to that which might be
experienced in a smoothly rising high-speed elevator, rather than from the
shock imparted by a firearm.
Accelerated to 13 km/sec, the plates are neither distorted, melted, nor
vaporized, as they would be if shot from a gun. When the plate is
accelerated to a speed about 20 times faster than a bullet, or 20 km/sec,
the more forceful acceleration needed to reach higher velocity causes
temperatures of 2,500 K to occur in the flyer plate; this liquefies aluminum
flyer plates.
Better understanding of launch configurations is expected to eliminate this
problem, though liquidation still is superior to the worst alternative of
vaporization - the result if conventional acceleration could be used to
reach these speeds. (No power can be delivered from a vaporized pellet.)
Characteristics of copper and titanium plates are also being investigated.
The plates are accelerated in the vacuum chamber at the core of Sandia's Z
machine, the most powerful producer of electrical discharge on Earth. Sandia
scientists last year used Z's enormous magnetic field to test materials by
compressing them - a method called isentropic compression.
In this even newer technique, staggering the firing of Z's 36 lines
eliminates the shock that melts the flyers at the higher velocities. The
resultant expansion of the powerful magnetic field is used to propel small
objects somewhat the way a surf boarder is propelled who catches one of a
succession of enormous waves.
A paper accepted by the Journal of Impact Engineering describes techniques
that accelerated the plates to 13 km/sec.
A paper to be submitted this spring to the Journal of Applied Physics shows
how improving the configuration of the loads increased the speed of the
flyer plates to 20 km/sec.
The work is funded primarily by DOE.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:39 MDT