I am currently in my first year of an engineering program so just recently learned about the many wonders of electromagnetism. For a school project this year I went on to build a coil gun using the usual set up of capacitors for power source. This was ample for the project but it was only near the end of the project that I learned about inductance. Now that I know about the basics of inductance it made me think that a step down transformer may be a more efficient way to power a coil gun since it is the current that produces the magnetic field, not the voltage. Rather than building a high voltage to produce the high current would it not be more efficient to take a lower voltage and simply induce a low voltage source with large current? My thinking is that you would just use the 120V AC source from any old wall outlet with a step down transformer, step the voltage down as much as possible and get a large current through the coil. When looking around online, I was unable to find anything pertaining to this question that was digestible to me with my current knowledge of the subject but the few things that I could wrap my head around seem to point to this being a possibility. I suspect I must be missing something crucial since I haven’t seen anyone else use this set up. Would anyone be able to point out the problem with this idea?
Add a comment
|
1 Answer
$\begingroup$
$\endgroup$
Keep in mind that the coil current is not independent of voltage. With all else kept the same, the coil pulse current is proportional to the pulse voltage. If you use a step down transformer (assuming an ideal one), stepping down the voltage by a factor $\alpha$ will also reduce the coil voltage by a factor $\alpha$. Yes, the secondary current would be higher than the primary current by the same factor, but ultimately it would still be lower than it would be without the step down transformer.
