Constructing a Large Railgun: Seeking Input

[Illumagnocity]

Just recently started toying around with this idea. and was looking for some good input from anyone more experienced in this area. I am currently working on a much smaller railgun but I plan on working on this larger one.

I am working with some others on this project I am more of the builder/ designer
a few questions i wanted to ask were.

If I were to fashion a ceramic barrel(trying to reduce corrosion to the rails) with rifling would that impeed on the lorentz force for the projectile.

could any current lithium ion laptop batteries power such a device if enough were gathered.


leaving this as an open discussion I will be posting my results on youtube after the first prototype is complete.

 

[Hologram0110]

All the rail gun designs I've ever seen are always powered by capacitors. They can be charged slowly but can release the energy very quickly. Bewarned, capacitors can be very dangerous because they can still shock you after the power source has been disconnected. You should either build the circuit so you can drain the capacitors by shorting them with a resistor or wait a sufficiently long time for the leakage current to do it for you. You can buy large ones online or you might be able to scavenge some larger ones from a few power supplies.

To power it directly from a battery I think you would need a very small rail gun or some very big batteries. You definitely don't want to short out large batteries so I wouldn't recommend putting them in series with the rail gun.

If you are powering it from a capacitor you can power it from just about any collection of batteries that has the right voltage. You might want to make sure that they charge slowly (over a few seconds) so they don't hurt the batteries.

 

[LURCH]

If I were to fashion a ceramic barrel(trying to reduce corrosion to the rails) with rifling would that impeed on the lorentz force for the projectile.

Not clear what you're describing here. How can you rifle the barrel on a rail gun? Are oyu just talking about a tube in which to house the rails, like to protect them from weather? If so, rifling does not seem to serve any purpose.

 

[cyberfish99]

Railguns are a more difficult weapon to create than say a coil gun which utilizes a coil of wire with a current running through it to generate an magnetic field which would propel a ferous projectile at high speeds