Electromagnetic Railgun

I was the project mentor for an electromagnetic railgun project.  The purpose of the project was to design and build an electromagnetic railgun capable of firing a 10-gram projectile over 200 meters per second.  I'm happy to say our team was very successful in getting this accomplished.  I won't bore you with the technical details, but I will show some cool photos.  First, we have some frame grabs from a cell-phone we used to film our high-energy shots.  The "fireball" you see is not from any type of gaseous explosion.  Rather, the projectile is a small (size of a thumb-nail) aluminum disk.  As the disk is accelerated, there is some ablation that occurs.  The sparks are the little pieces of alumina catching fire and burning up.  The whole sequence below occurs in the blink of an eye.

 

 

 

We were fortunate enough to have a high-speed camera in our Department of Physics.  We took a picture of the event at 10,000 frames per second.  Below are some of these pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

The project was really fun.  The students did a fantastic job.  We took some more data at an extremely high frame-rate.  I think we have one picture where the projectile is perfectly visible--if and when this data is finalized, I'll post an update.  Pleasant week to all.