Railgun Physics: Final Thoughts

Having completed this project I have several thoughts about what I did, what I could’ve done, and what I want to do in the future. This project taught me a lot about physics, a little about engineering, and a great deal about modeling and the work and mindset necessary to complete projects of this nature.

 

The physics I got to explore as part of this project was extraordinary. Before I began, I knew little about railguns, only that they used extremely powerful electromagnetic forces to create massive destruction. The first part of my results showed an interesting but unsurprising result. The initial current originating from the capacitor was extremely large; a capacitor charged to 1.8 coulombs generated an initial current of over a million amperes. At first, this value seemed a bit high, and in reality was most likely a little higher than we expected. However, within a matter of several hundredths of a micro-second, this value immediately dropped to several hundred thousand amperes and then even lower values shortly thereafter. The current dropped even further when the length of the rails changed or when the cross sectional area of the rail decreased. Doing both of these, something that is realistic over time, lowers the current even more drastically. Therefore, we saw that the rail gun really does involve an initial intense burst of current followed by no further circuit action. We then saw the effect of EMF. At the beginning of the project, I thought that EMF would be too hard to derive and almost discounted it. Having done it, I realize that this decision would have been poor, as EMF ended up playing a huge role. The EMF induced a current that reduced the original current by almost 3/7ths, a substantial amount. Once again, this factor was dependent on the length of the rails and conductivity of the material. Finally, the resulting magnetic field was extremely powerful but fell in line with all the other results we found. In the first moments of the circuit’s operation, an enormous magnetic field is generated, creating a large force for a very brief amount of time.  This occurrence made sense of course, as magnetic field depends on current. I am happy with these results, as they mirror the conceptual understanding of railguns I have developed during the course of this project; an enormous power lasts for an infinitesimal amount of time.

    Part of our project was not able to happen, of course. We had originally planned to build the small scale rail gun, but because of time and safety concerns were unable to. In the future when doing these kinds of projects I will be able to better adjust my plans for safety and for time. I also could have tried to make more 3D models of my models, but thought that the 2D representations made sense in the context of the project.

    In the future I would like to be able to derive equations of motion as functions of time. So many of the results I obtained were dependent on velocity and position. I adjusted for this by allowing these variables to be selected over a certain range; for example, using my model can tell you what the magnetic field of a railgun is at an exact time, position, and velocity. This result is very useful, but I would ideally like to be able to have position and velocity as functions of time as well. With more time and more math, specifically a greater knowledge of differential equations, I think I would be able to do so.

Share

1 thought on “Railgun Physics: Final Thoughts

  1. gaanand

    Hey Elias!

    Firstly, I’m sorry you guys didn’t get to actually build the rail gun; I’m sure everyone would’ve loved to see that. Your project and especially your Mathematica notebook were extremely thorough. I was very impressed with the effort you put into commenting your notebook. Although the mathematical derivations were very intense, they were very easily followed. The YouTube videos of the Mathematica animations certainly helped visualize what effect different variables had on the systems you were presenting. I was really surprised to see the amount of current produced by the military-scale rail gun; what a powerful device!

    I do have some very minor critiques though. The 2-D drawing of the rail gun doesn’t seem to do it justice; perhaps a small scale non functioning model would have been nice. Is there some sort of electric field induced by the magnetic field? If it does exist, the effects that would have on the rail gun might be particularly interesting. Also, what kind of differential equations are involved in the equations of motion? For example, what order are they? How exactly would you go about solving them?

    Overall I really enjoyed reading through your blog posts and Mathematica file and managed to learn quite a lot about the physics behind rail guns. Occasionally I was confused about what some of the variables represented in your blog posts, but most of them seemed to be defined, just not where I was looking. Since you had so many equations due to the nature of your project, I think a small appendix section at the end of each blog post with each variable defined would be quite helpful for the reader. Your presentation in class was also very informative, albeit a bit lengthy.

    Deep

Comments are closed.