So I recently acquired 6, 450V 1500uF capacitors and have been toying with the thought of multi-stage, or a higher power single stage coilgun. Just for a thought exercise, consider the following.
My current coilgun has 4800uF total at 440VDC which works out to about 465J in electrical energy. If I add the 6 caps for a total of 13,800uF, I can expand the power up to 1,335J in electrical energy, however I have yet to simulate what the current coil would do under those conditions. A more likely thought would be have a multistage coil of 4 stages (first stage 4800uF, following 3 stages at 3000uF) with optical triggering yielding a much better efficiency with some tuning….
This seriously makes me want to consider dusting off the coilgun and characterizing its ballistic energy, and amongst other things build a 1.3kJ single stage coilgun for kicks. I have 4 SCR pucks, and hopefully there is sufficient durability in them to do wire-exploding in the case of a 1.3kJ cap bank….
Procrastinatus 