1kJ Homemade Railgun

Intro: 1kJ Homemade Railgun

I have made a picture and caption instructable of how to make this: https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-Homemade-Railgun/

This is a 1kJ railgun that I made for my high school science fair project, using a 15600uF capacitor bank. I wanted to determine what proportion of the energy in the capacitors was actually converted to kinetic energy (it turns out not much if any).

Comments

[3967]

i think the problem here is that you you alluminium bars. You should better use copper bars because they habe no aluminium oxide on the surface which limits the current, and also they are in general better (also lower ohms and better hearesistant). Another problem could be the wrong projektile shape or the space between rail and projectile. greetings

[SeinP]

I am making a railgun and having the same problem like you. Did you find the way to solve the problems?

[3967]

maybe the soloution is to switch to plasmguns when you like the fire and smoke, or you switch to coilguns if you dont like fire and smoke ;). greetings

[Devon.and.Terrianne.Witherow]

Nice !!!!!

Thanks 4 sharing !! Bud !!!

DEv

[resistanceisfutileiflessthan1ohm]

would really like to see a text and image tutorial for this.

[marcrigter]

I just made one :)

[meseta]

Her, really interesting work. Just to let you know, we've featured this on our new projects/hacks/mods site: http://modthat.com/highschool-science-fair-railgun/ Hopefully someone knowledgeable about railguns will be able to help. Best of luck!

[marcrigter]

Thats awesome! Thanks!

[rimar2000]

Interesting work.

Thanks for put captions on video!

[marcrigter]

Cheers man!