I haven’t had the time to put the page up yet, but it works… E-mail me and remind me I need to get this up some time 😉

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I did an interview for EE Web last year; it is a site I enjoy visiting from time to time. Here is the interview:

https://www.eeweb.com/spotlight/interview-with-sam-barros

Another spectacular RailGun 3.0 video, this one using a Plasma Armature to propel a polymer projectile.

 I just got back from a 4 day trip to North Carolina where, in just 4 days, I was able to completely machine and assemble my 3rd RailGun design. Testing was made possible by Aron Kosho, who provided the lab space at his company, Resonant Power Systems, and took it upon himself to design and assemble the switch and power supply. The results were nothing short of spectacular: The gun fired at up to 105Kilojoules, and put armatures through an inch of plywood from across the room with no pre-injection of any sort.
Don’t take my word for it though! See it here:

More Updates to the PowerLabs Youtube Channel ; https://www.youtube.com/powerlabs

Stay tuned for an all-new Railgun page detailing this exciting new project 🙂

All new! A 4 Stage Cockroft-Walton Cascade fed by a car ignition coil, outputting 200 thousand volts. Pictures, description and video now at the page. More to come.

I have been enormously lucky to have come across ten units of the very best, highest energy density pulse discharge capacitors I have ever come across. It wasn’t cheap, but these capacitors will mark a whole new era of pulse discharge research at PowerLabs! Highlights will include a new, Railgun 3.0, which will have more stored energy than most research guns found at University labs.
Each individual capacitor is rated as 12kV, 266uF, and stored as much energy as the entire capacitor bank on the previous PowerLabs Railgun. Even more impressive; they only weight 36lbs (16kg) each!

This is my current project; it will utilize one of the 20kJ units pictured above and be switched by a Thyratron. The drawings are now done and renderings are posted on the ETC Gun Site.
I need $800 for materials, so it’ll be a little while until it gets built.

You may probably be wondering what happened with the RailGun 2.0… Did it work? Did it fire?
And what have I been up to?
Well… We filmed this episode with Workoholic Productions over the summer, and it features my first railgun firings, as well as an all-new lightning gun produced by kVA Effects which just needs to be seen to be believed!