HOBBY PROJECT
Railgun (in progress)
I'm building a railgun with an experimental low-voltage design.
I've been obsessed with railguns since middle school. I decided to actually build one in 2025 after some making some design sketches and feasibility calculations on a notepad.
Nearly all of my initial assumptions were wrong, and I learned that the hard way. I’ve been building, testing, and redesigning for over a year, becoming intimately acquainted with the (somewhat) practical application of kinematics and E&M. After hundreds of design changes, I've finally got a design I'm (tentatively) happy with.
My design's uniqueness comes from using neodymium magnets to generate the magnetic field instead of inducing it purely from the current in the rails. This means I need just 1% of the current typical hobby railguns use, allowing me to get away with slightly increasing the resistance of the armature by adding graphite sliders and a spring-loading mechanism. This makes the railgun much less prone to the levels of rail wear that usually make them unfeasible.
As much as I love this railgun, it’s got major weak points; the total static resistance is too high (~.25 Ω), the projectile efficiency is embarrassingly low (2.6%), and the armature is abysmally un-aerodynamic. I'm looking forward to solving these problems in V2!