**1. Introduction**

Propelling projectiles with a controlled speed and trajectory is a technological challenge having lots of applications ranging from kicking soccer balls to launching rockets or satellites, including testing military ammunitions. In this introduction, we focus on propulsion techniques having strong accelerations, so that an important speed can be obtained in a short distance. Common propulsion techniques of this type are among the following ones:

• **Chemical propulsion**: mainly used for propelling weapons or rockets; chemical propulsion uses the product of a chemical explosive or expanding reaction to push out a projectile [1]. The benefit of this propulsion is to have a high density of energy stored in a small size as a chemical product leading to strong accelerations, without the need of being connected to a power supply. Its drawback is that the propulsion is a single shot one due to the chemical reaction.

