| Author | Message | ||
     Dark |
I'm making a gauss rifle for my science fair project and I'm trying to find out if i can make the rifle go even faster and more accurate so like it can be used to hit targets. Got any ideas? | ||
| Simon Quellen Field (Sfield) |
As I wrote in the section "Speed and kinetic energy", the Gauss Rifle can be scaled up by using more magnets (and more steel balls). Using 4 times as many magnets will double the speed of the ball. If speed is more important to you than the amount of energy delivered to the target, there is a way to make the final ball go faster, but with some loss of total energy. The trick is to replace the last ball with a series of balls, each with 5% less mass than the previous one. Some energy will be lost due to reflections (bounces) when the balls are not the same mass, but we can minimize this to some extent by having the next ball be only 5% smaller. The kinetic energy is (mass times velocity times velocity) divided by 2. By making a chain of progressively smaller balls, the last ball has much less mass, and we still have almost all of the energy, so the velocity goes up. To get the velocity, we double the energy, divide by the mass, and take the square root of the result. So, making the mass smaller, but keep as much energy as we can, we can raise the velocity. Losses are greater with higher velocities, however. Something going twice as fast has 16 times as much air friction. |
