Coilgun Development

If you are contemplating building a powerful coil gun, my blog would be a good place to find ideas and maybe a few pointers. If you are interested to see how we developed what we have and how we got there I would recommend starting here. Start at the bottom and read the posts in backwards order. If you like to kill the suspense you can start here and then read older posts to see where we came from. the observant will notice that this whole thing came together in less than a year. You wont find any calculations or much reasoning behind why we did what we did but if you make a comment I would be able to explain things to those who are interested. Here's a quick teaser picture of how powerful it was 6 months ago.(it shoots a .5"x2" bolt)

A few pointers that should help your gun.

About the IGBT make sure you have a hefty diode anti-parallel to the coil. With out it you will destroy any IGBT you use. I learned from experience here. Also make sure you drive the gate with a high enough voltage. 12V usually works well. Anything less and you won't turn on the IGBT fast enough. Some people use 24V but I use 12V.

Cut the end of your bolt off and get a smaller barrel or a larger bolt, you want there to be as little space between the coil and the projectile as possible.

You could also add a comparator to control the relay to automatically charge it up to X amount of voltage and hold it there like I did with my charger.

Other then that good job! It looks great.

Also I edited the first link in your post, you had

Quote :

http://http://philstechnologyblog.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2007-10-01T19%3A09%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=20

Justin