/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1174900
Use common sense. What have they taught you about capacitors in class? Capacitors store energy, the energy stored in them depends on capacitance and voltage, the energy increases linearly with capacitance, but exponentially with voltage, this means increasing your voltage is more desirable. It's like filling a compressed air tank, if you want to fire a projectile out of an air gun you don't want a lot of air, you want a small amount of air with a high pressure.
You want your capacitor to have around 200 to 400 volts, higher voltages are stupidly dangerous and can kill you in an instant.

If you look for capacitors you'll see the highest energy density belongs to supercaps, but those operate on low voltage, the next ones are electrolytic capacitors, which are ideal for a coilgun. Ceramic capacitors, although they're good at handling very high voltages, have a poor energy density.

>>1174907
>10F
No, unless you want your coils to melt into a puddle of molten copper. The voltage must be high to push those electrons though the coil and the capacitance should be relatively low to create only a short but very strong electromagnetic pulse to fire the projectile.