Finally, I finished a video discussing an important topic - the role of power supply voltage in electromagnetic accelerators. In addition, I'm demonstrating there a special "two-shoulder" circuit for obtaining double HV voltage on series-connected batteries of electrolytic capacitors. The video editing began in the summer, as there is a reservation in the introduction :) Have a nice viewing to everyone!

New small video describing Excel calculator for UCx84x-based capactor chargers added to my YouTube-channel.

Tom Stanton has developed an interesting multistage catapult accelerator for launching aircraft models. This is the second example of his authorship for such applications. In the first one, the standard method for coilguns was used to accelerate a ferromagnet (in this case, a permanent magnet) with a chain of coils, now the original scheme is applied with acceleration not of a magnet, but of a coil in a field formed by a chain of fixed magnets. This construction attracted my attention, because I myself have been thinking a lot in this direction lately. Perhaps I will release a new video on this topic soon...

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A description of a device for measuring saturation currents of inductive elements added to my YouTube channel. A very useful and even necessary thing in the development of any transformer- and choke-based voltage converters.

Tokamake has constructed new brilliant TK-20 coilgun and published Youtube-video about it. The model is added into the Accelerator Table. Due to high-power voltage converter, high fire-rate of 2 shot/sec is achieved (in reduced energy mode), which is decent for capacitor-driven coilguns. Recuperative circuit led to 16 % efficiency.

The link to the website of interesting battery-driven accelerators and the associated YouTube channel has been updated. By the way, the developers have posted a new model of their automatic MK.2 coilgun there with very impressive parameters: the speed is about 80 m/s, muzzle energy is 40 J, the rate of fire is up to 2400 rpm (i.e. 40 rounds per second!). Such characteristics fit well into the ranges that I evaluated in this article, but the rate of fire is, of course, outstanding - it would be interesting to know the structure of the feeder mechanism in this accelerator... ... Read more »

Megavolt attached a second module to his coilgun - the resulting device with a maximum projectile velocity of 151 m/s was added to the Accelerator Table. As you can see, the ambitious task of exceeding the speed of sound is still far from being solved, but the case is progressing. Interestingly, the empirical parameter K_x increased during the transition from a single-module design to a two-module one, while the G-factor, on the contrary, decreased. My hypothesis (which appeared after discussions with the author of the design) is that this is caused by the incipient influence of the skin effect in the solid ferromagnet of the accelerated body. If this is the case, then with a further increase in speed, the problems will build up... Let's see what ... Read more »

A wonderful device added to the Accelerator Table - a multistage (40 coils! ) coilgun MR9. Its peculiarity, in addition to the recuperative scheme, consists precisely in the gigantic number of accelerating steps - a record among all the gauss-guns of the Table. And not only that - to be honest, I have never seen an accelerator with such a number of windings in all the time of my passion for Gauss-building, i.e. for almost 20 years! This design also made it possible to obtain a huge acceleration length of more than 40 cm, which, combined with the relatively low energy spent on the shot (approx. 126 J) gave an absolutely phenomenal efficiency - more than 32 % !! This in itself allows us to call ... Read more »

New video added to my Youtube-channel describing construction of simple HV source-measurer.

Recently, I decided to fix some links in the Accelerator Table. In addition, there was a desire to make the information in the table more specific, namely, to take into account such a value as the length of projectiles when calculating the G-factor.

In the course of the work that began, errors in previously performed calculations were also revealed, and as a result, I had to conduct a complete revision of my recent articles with corrections to the formulas in them and changes to the numerical values ... Read more »