Engineer builds railgun partly with 3D-printed parts
An engineer made a railgun and posted it on Reddit. A railgun is an electric gun that uses magnetic fields to accelerate its projectiles instead of using gunpowder. The rifle fires bullets of tungsten, aluminum, carbon and Teflon.
Most of the parts of user NSA_Listbot’s WXPR railgun come from a 3d printer. Only the important parts such as the barrel, capacitors and the injection system have a different origin. This railgun’s 1.1 gram projectiles move at a speed of 250 meters per second, which is subsonic and in most cases non-lethal.
While a railgun has the potential to be more powerful than its gunpowder-based counterpart, as seen in the US Navy, that is not the case with this rifle. To achieve this, a larger source of energy is needed than just a battery. For example, a nuclear reactor powers the US Navy’s railgun. A railgun that is both portable and deadly is therefore not yet practically feasible at the moment.
NSA_Listbot says it has been working on his creation for a year and a half. The rifle weighs over twenty pounds. About half of that weight comes from the six capacitors that store the electrical energy before firing. Those capacitors are arranged under the barrel in three rows of two.
Power is supplied by a 12-volt three-cell lithium-ion polymer battery. The energy of the battery is converted into 1100 Volts and 1.8 kilojoules of energy. An Arduino Uno R3 monitors voltages, amps, and temperatures. To get the projectile between the rails, NSA_Listbot uses a CO2 injection with a pressure of 300psi.
After three or four firings, the battery is empty. The inside of the rails is worn after about ten shots. According to the Reddit user, there is room for improvement; it is estimated that 2 to 5 percent of electrical energy is now converted into kinetic energy. In a gallery on Imgur, the aerospace engineer goes into detail about the build process of his railgun, and in the posting on the diy subreddit, he answers questions from other users.
All gray parts come from the 3d printer, which had to print continuously for thirty days to produce everything