In order to further improve the effectiveness of the tests on sub-scale electromagnetic railgun

theoretical analysis and numerical simulations are carried out to assess the similarity performance of rail dynamics under the condition of the fields scaling method of the EM railgun launcher. The results show that: the stress field and rail dynamics can not be matched as long as the scaling method is desirous to use the same material in two scales and to match the magnetic and temperature field as well; at velocity matching approximate field scaling condition

the rails of sub-scale and full-scale launchers have the same critical velocity

but the rail dynamics are the non-linear relations

and the correlation coefficient is getting smaller with armature moving

the amplitude approximately scales as the geometric scaling factor.