Railgun proposal for my cap bank.

Tesladownunder, Fri Jul 21 2006, 11:30AM

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
1153481412 10 FT0 Railguncomplete1
Re: Railgun proposal for my cap bank.
Quantum Singularity, Sat Jul 22 2006, 02:13AM

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. dead 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.