Week 3

Week 3

Initial construction of prototype

Capacitor bank 2

     The third week of the project we sat down and began construction of our prototype. We bought copper wire, and laid it down upon the toy train track. We only used a single 'block' of the track for the first attempt, for simplicity. With the rails in place, we connected our new bank of 10 4400 microfarad capacitors in parallel and obtained a 25V power supply to charge them. Since we were just trying to get the rail to do something, our projectile for testing was another piece of copper wire, rather than the train. The singular copper wire would have considerably less mass than the train and would serve as a better starting point to get the ball rolling.

Prototype 1

Prototype 2

     We had limited success with this prototype. We learned rather quickly that unless the projectile had initial velocity, it would become welded to the rails due to the large amount of current. So, we extended the system and added a drop-ramp such that gravity would provide ample initial velocity. This yielded a little bit more success, but "dropping" it onto the rail introduced too many variables for human error; unless it was dropped perfectly, the projectile would roll off one of the two rails and break the circuit. 

     We needed to revise our design. We decided it would be detrimental to pursue the train rail system since it would have been too difficult to devise a consistent launch mechanism in the limited time we had, and the train itself was much more massive than the wire projectile. We decided that perhaps just a gun would suffice, seeing how the only modern use of rail technology is for guns. We returned to YouTube and came up with a new prototype design, using two manufactured aluminum bars for the rail, seated in an acrylic housing. This new design addressed one of the two problems we were experiencing. We no longer had to worry about the projectile losing contact with the rails, but we still didn't have a reliable delivery system of the projectile into the system.