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Portable 1.25kJ coilgun finally done

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Saz43

Wed Sept 15 2010, 07:45AM

Registered Member #1525 Joined: Mon Jun 09 2008, 12:16AM
Location: America
Posts: 294

Hey everyone!

I've been working on this project on and off for over 2 years now, interrupted often by school, frustration, and also general laziness. But after a solid summer of late nights in the garage, and tons of support from you guys, it's done!

It's a fully portable, NiMH powered, ZVS charged and SCR switched single stage design. The overall goal wasn't efficiency or to successfully employ any clever tricks, but rather to see how thick of an object I could blow a hole through with a hand held gun. The mechanical design was optimized to be lightweight, compact, and easily accessible for maintenance. Electrically, I tried to keep things as simple as possible. The gun centers around Uzzors2k's ZVS capacitor charger, found here:

(Uzzors, you are the man).

Here are some specs:

- Power supply: 12V NiMH battery (fires about 15 times/charge)
- Charging: 40 watt regulated ZVS flyback driver (charge time ~30s)
- Capacitor bank: 4x 3900uF @ 400VDC
- Stored electrical energy: 1.248kJ
- Switching: one massive stud-mount SCR
- Clamping diode: NONE- charger output bridge rectifier takes care of this
- Barry's sim puts the discharge at a peak of 4.6kA with zero crossing at 2.68ms.

Here's a video with an technical overview and of course plenty of carnage:

And a photo album showing the finished product:

**Update: Photobucket bandwidth blown, pictures in video form here:

GhostNull

Wed Sept 15 2010, 08:45AM

Registered Member #2648 Joined: Sun Jan 24 2010, 12:45PM
Location: Australia
Posts: 291

Very nice! Good work! =D

Edit:
Your design is very neat and compact
I see you made some diagrams for your coilgun (pics at end of video)
Could you post them please?
They would be useful to other people to see how such a neat coilgun is made and designed. =D

Thanks!

Torchwood

Wed Sept 15 2010, 03:27PM

Registered Member #2668 Joined: Sun Jan 31 2010, 12:11PM
Location: South Australia
Posts: 18

Very well done, I am impressed, design, looks, performance and style!

So what movie will this be appearing in?

Saz43

Thu Sept 16 2010, 09:41AM

Registered Member #1525 Joined: Mon Jun 09 2008, 12:16AM
Location: America
Posts: 294

GhostNull wrote ...

Very nice! Good work! =D

Edit:
Your design is very neat and compact
I see you made some diagrams for your coilgun (pics at end of video)
Could you post them please?
They would be useful to other people to see how such a neat coilgun is made and designed. =D

Thanks!

My pleasure.

First, everything is laid out and wired together on a test-bed (I managed to break a window since this was flimsy).

Here are some gun drawings. You'll notice that I went through several design iterations before I came to something I was happy building. Some elements from each design made it into the final build.

Since the whole design is built around the charging circuit, it was carefully laid out to-scale on graph paper before being soldered together.

Here is the preliminary design on the barrel mount and SCR housing.

This shows the mechanical construction progress. Everything was based off of the scale drawing to make sure that each piece was cut and assembled properly.

This shows the electrical systems coming together. Note that there is a layer of packing tape between each coil layer to provide cohesion and insulation, and the the final coil is heat-shrink-tubed for safety and protection.

Just for fun, here's my "lab"

, and here's my PSU for the testbed

, built just for this project.

GhostNull

Thu Sept 16 2010, 10:15AM

Registered Member #2648 Joined: Sun Jan 24 2010, 12:45PM
Location: Australia
Posts: 291

Great! I've uploaded the photos so they never become broken links =)

Saz43 wrote ...

First, everything is laid out and wired together on a test-bed (I managed to break a window since this was flimsy).

1284631586 2648 FT96610 Designiterations

Here are some gun drawings. You'll notice that I went through several design iterations before I came to something I was happy building. Some elements from each design made it into the final build.

Since the whole design is built around the charging circuit, it was carefully laid out to-scale on graph paper before being soldered together.

Here is the preliminary design on the barrel mount and SCR housing.

7 This shows the mechanical construction progress. Everything was based off of the scale drawing to make sure that each piece was cut and assembled properly.

Barry

Thu Sept 16 2010, 01:11PM

Registered Member #90 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:44PM
Location: Seattle, Washington
Posts: 301

Very nice job! Well done, and even the video looks very professional.
Thanks for the credits at the end, I am touched!

Cheers, Barry
They keep asking me "Paper or plastic?" So I answer, "Either one, I'm bi-sacks-ual."

woxxey

Thu Sept 16 2010, 03:26PM

Registered Member #1906 Joined: Sat Jan 03 2009, 05:06PM
Location:
Posts: 39

Now that's one good looking coilgun! And judging by the video it seems to be performing quite well as well.

TechNerd

Sun Sept 19 2010, 01:19PM

Registered Member #2289 Joined: Thu Aug 13 2009, 02:49PM
Location: Jylland, Denmark
Posts: 19

Awesome job... very impressed indeed.. :D

uzzors2k

Sun Sept 19 2010, 02:26PM

Registered Member #95 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:57PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 1308

Dude, that's so cool! I think this is the best portable coil gun I've ever seen. The bodywork is amazing!

Saz43

Wed Sept 22 2010, 07:39AM

Registered Member #1525 Joined: Mon Jun 09 2008, 12:16AM
Location: America
Posts: 294

Pictures saved in video form due to bandwidth limit on Photobucket:

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