Simulation and Experiment on Cooling of Pulsed High Current Linear Driver

A large amount of heat is accumulated in rails during the repeated conditions, which degrades the sliding electrical contact performance. It can shorten the life of pulsed high current linear driver. Therefore, it is necessary to cooling the rails during launching. In this paper, a 3D rail model with cooling pipes was established for numerical simulation and a cooling experiment platform was constructed, which was for the research of rail cooling. The thermocouple was adopted to measure the rail temperature, and the influence of flow rate, flow mode and coolant of the cooling effect was investigated. The simulation and experimental results showed that with the increasing of flow rate, the cooling effect was improved, but it was not linear. The cooling effect of mode 2 flowing from the middle pipes to the shoulder pipes was best among the three flow modes. The average temperature difference of mode 2 was 5.67 K lower than mode 1 flowing from the tail to the muzzle. Water and ethylene glycol had little difference in cooling effect. Thus, in the design of thermal management system of pulsed high current linear driver, it is not necessary to increase the flow rate of coolant persistently, but more attention should be paid to the influence of flow mode. Furthermore, the selection of coolant should be combined with specific experiment conditions.