 Railgun proposal for my cap bank.
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Tesladownunder
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Registered Member #10
Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 09:45AM
Location: Bunbury, Australia
Posts: 1424
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I have a bit of a hankering to try my big cap bank on a railgun. Having seen what explosive power the discharge has, I am inclined to think a plasma armature setup might be better than a metal projectile.
The cap bank is 225uF at 12kV (=16kJ) and each of the 3 caps is 100kA rated. It has mechanical switching which has been reliable up to the highest energy I have used of 5kJ and the highest current of 80kA. The lowest voltage rated cap (12kV) is 80% reversal rated and the other caps are 20% rated at 20kV.
My previous railgun which only just got to a firing stage used 1.5kJ of electrolytics with SCR switching. It had pneumatic injection and Teflon rails. I didn't get to doing velocity measurements.
For this cap bank, however the explosive effect will be high and I don't think pneumatic injection is worthwhile in this case. The ability to contain high pressures will place a lot of stress on the insulator and the area it enters. The rails will be close and may spontaneously fire but I plan to have an alfoil ignitor to provide the initial path for the plasma behind the projectile.
Any comments?
Pic shows my previous setup.
Peter
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Quantum Singularity
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Registered Member #158
Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 09:53PM
Location: Central Ohio
Posts: 282
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Well, I orignally bought my big maxwells with the intentions of building a railgun. However at that time there was little info online and my prototype didnt work. We were just kinda winging it. I did succesfully launch a projectile straight up perpendicular to the rails though.  So I cant offer much assistance but I would definately like to hear whatever results you attain if you build one. Maybe one day I'll try the railgun again but for now its going to induction launchers / shrinkers. I am currently working on a heavy duty sprak gap switch for it, once it is complete I got a whole lot of projects I want to try! Good luck.
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