Electromagnetic Rail Launcher 

"Aircraft Launcher" , thats a freaking gun Tom, a cool gun though

I love your channel so much. When I was a kid I tried to make a maglev track in my room. This makes me feel the same childlike wonder.

5:13 That look of betrayal, staring directly into the camera. That cheese stick trusted you.

You know this is how particle accelerators work? Like the large Hadron collider. The particles are attracted by large electromagnets which then switch to repel the particle away - arranged in a circle this allows the particle to be accelerated to some insane speeds, before they smash it into another particle really fast because why not 🤷‍♂️

Tom: "Your turn little one" Coil: "Are you winding me up?"

Nice work on those slomo shots in this one

Nice job. And as an EE, excellent description for the layman. And then the inner child comes to the surface, which was fun to watch.

I would love to see more of the build and design and engineering process as opposed to the hot dog launching personally, though neither part can stand on its own. They are both important.

Those jet sounds are fire, Tom. You’ve literally made a rail plane. Love it.

Tom: "Aircraft Launcher" Everyone else: "Railgun"

3:52 makes it look like the barrel of a railgun

4:36 Tell me you're at a spar, without telling me you're at a spar

I'm glad I stayed untill the end. Seeing those planes being launched was awesome!

Just when I thought your videos couldn't get much better, you go ahead and weaponise a sausage

VERY INTERESTING !!! You may not realize this, but high speed rail lines are just starting to use this Principle to pull/shove monorail cars to their destinations. I studied this principle in tech college in the late 1980's. The coils are only hot in one area, where the train is. Thank you for making your prototype. It was very good !

1:40 instead of turning it off you could reverse the positive and negative charges so that the polarity of the magnetic field is reversed and pushes the magnet away

Always excellent videos. Bonus material......Slow motion bee captured at 6:44 in the background, racing the plane at take off.

6:42 - Housefly bogey has entered our airspace, interceptor aircraft launched! It would be neat to see an LED on each coil (over the MOSFET output, ~5mA wouldn't matter to the coils) and/or on the Hall effect output. With the high-speed camera, you could see all the timing.

Love what you do man!!! Makes me even more motivated to finish my electrical engineering degree

You can shorten the rail by 2 times or leave it long (increase speed). By adding the function of changing polarity when the projectile leaves the coil

I'm pretty sure that despite having a rail, this is technically a Gauss-gun or Coil-gun. The title of Coil aircraft launcher is correct. If you had connected a bar across two rails that had a current through them then you'd have a true "Rail-gun."

In addition to flipping the magnet polarity halfway through to increase the force applied by each magnet, you can also vary the timing between each sensor detection and the coil activation to improve the output. Since the payload speed varies dramatically along the rail, the optimum delay between sled detection and coil activation will also vary. Conveniently, you can use the time difference between the previous two detections to get an estimate of the current velocity of the sled, so you can actually make this time offset dynamic relative to the mass of your payload with no additional hardware. Some people commented to instead vary the spacing between each coil, but that's just wasting rail space and acceleration distance (not to mention the optimum spacing would vary with payload mass). You have such a good idea of the position and velocity of your sled with the sensor setup that keeping the coils closely packed and varying the timing will give better results. Also note that as suggested by some others, optical sensors might be more tolerant to the substantial magnetic field you're dealing with in case you find you're getting spurious/early triggers due to the field from the previous coils going off, which might be a bigger problem once you're flipping the polarity.

I love your video editing. The footage caught some interesting angles and content!

Linear induction motors are also used on the Skytrain (Vancouver's light rail system). So thousands of people use rails guns to get to from work everyday

Military: Noooo, You can‘t just have a railgun at home. Tom: Haha, Paperplane launcher goes brrrrrr

Tom, put an Led next to (electrically accross) each coil. It would be cool to see them switch on in slow motion.

alternative title : "I made an paper plane launcher" (6:00) (it was really cool btw)

I imagined a model roller coaster using this design and you did it. AWESOME 3000!

Linear induction motors are insane!!

The sound effects at 1:45 got you a like and a sub!

I've been working on a circuit like this for a while and i think it can be done without the hall effect sensors. If you use each coil as an analog input for a microcontroller, you will get an induced voltage on the input as the bullet/sled approaches the coil. As soon as you do, switch it to an output and apply current through a mosfet for a fixed period, then switch back to input. Repeat for each coil. This would give you the ability to launch ferromagnetic metals as well as magnets.

absolutely beautiful slow motion shots

Slight modification for the launcher. Put a pin across it and cut a small hook into the bottom of the paper plane so you can pull it from IN front of the C of G. The old school whitewings catapults used something like that.

I expect a lot of speed can be gained by modifying the timing. They Halleffect sensor together with the Mosfet and the electronic has a latency, which is the same for each module, but the speed increases along the rail, thus the later magnets tend to stay on longer than optimal

That hotdog slow-mo was exactly what I needed today! keep up the content!

4:44 I swear this is an act of war

6:41 - It flies as fast as a fly in the middle of the screen. How did you do that? How did you manage to teach a fly to fly along your paper plane?

Tom, have you considered the eddy currents generated by the moving magnets above the Al rail? Even at that distance it will cause some losses. Great Video (as always :-) CU in the next one.

This was so cool, really amazing project!

When you make Mk.2 of this you should make a spring stopper to catch the sled. Maybe you could even create a magnetic levitating sled for low friction.

So now he has a Gauss Rifle. Sweet :) When are you launching your own spaceship? :D

increase the distance between the coils logarithmically... Also you'd think an optical sensor would be less prone to interference than a Hall effect sensor in such a magnetically noisy environment.

you explaining it makes it seem so easy

lovely sight for a project

A brilliant idea for the holidays. I’ll try to reverse the direction of the current repelling the magnet further. You could literally carry the whole setup in your back bag. I think it’ll be lots of fun with crazy engineers around me.

I love how everyone knows it's a railgun without him having to say the word even once lol

that first coaster in the video is called the skyrocket! its in a park called Kennywood outside of Pittsburgh. great ride and kinda neat to see in a video!

Thats a great project brilliant launcher.

The first thing I thought of was using some sort of flip-flop and a second MOSFET per coil to reverse polarity as the sled passes. Also some sort of bearing for the sled (almost anything really). Glad you're going to be revising and improving! Looks cool!

You might want to consider spacing out the coils progressively, and making them longer as they stretch further out! A similar thing is done with linear particle accelerators, where the accelerating electrodes become longer and longer so the particle is affected by them for the same amount of time as it accelerates: link to article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_particle_accelerator

Really cool! I could hang out at Micro Center all day.

Nice Job Mate ! A brilliant layman's 👏 description ideal for training

The real version (EMALS) made by General Atomics is a type of linear induction motor. So instead of pulling a permanent magnet armature like yours, they create an accelerating magnetic wave which accelerates an aluminum armature. Very cool demonstration!

Hey Tom, did you checked how good you timed the coils? E.g. with your slow motion camera and an led per coil to show if its active? Since magnets are extremely strong close by, hitting the perfect spot to turn the spoils off seems very important.

The part that begins at 5:52 is the best!

More of this please!!! Nice work!

This is awesome! However I feel that once the magnet reaches a certain speed, which isn't far above that created by the first coil, the other coils have a much reduced contribution due to "back EMF" limiting the current drawn by them. What you need is a constant current driver for all the coils, using a high frequency switching power supply for efficiency, and a higher voltage supply, to force that current through the coils the sled is passing quickly. Or you could set up progressive banks of the coils supplied by higher voltage than the prior ones, though you definitely should make sure the sled doesn't get stuck, or that they still have the current-limiting failsafe. I hope I explained that we'll enough to visualize, I have a different, more electronic background. Cheers! 🍻

If you decelerate the sled at the end, you can recover some of the energy you used to accelerate it in the first place. Check out the energy required, and it opens up some cool ideals for reducing fuel requirements for launching aircraft and rockets.

From 6:41 - 6:48 you captured a fly or a bug of some sort in your slow motion footage, just above the bottom rail in your deck. You can see each individual wing beat and even It's shadow on the deck. I thought that was pretty cool, what are the chances of that! Dropped a sub for this epic footage and awesome inventions, keep it up Tom!

About the concept of attracting and repelling. A long time ago, I watched a documentary about roller coasters. And the new style used magnets to draw the ride cars forward then it would flip polarity and push the cars as the next magnet pulled.

5:01 Tom.exe is not responding.

Great work. 👍

I love the way you can explain it so easily never subscribed so fast

That reminded me of the Flightdeck! Cool proof of concepts. Cheer's!!

Great project! Maybe put a led parallel to the coil so we can see in the slow-mo when it gets activated and when it shuts of. Could be helpful to tune the timing too

I would guess this setup is quite sensitive to the synchronization of the coils. If the next coil is turning on too slow, the payload will pass by before experiencing any additional force

Great visualizations!

Absolutely brilliant love this channel great video

I love that the slow mo capture also caught a bee in the background flying parallel to the fence at 6:42.

Trying to get the coil current to zero instantly is gonna probably fry the mosfets in the long run

2:29 that solder job is amazing

Probably your best vid yet!

It would be interesting to put that in a loop, I wonder what the max speed would be

I'm a little surprised you didn't make a self-releasing hook to tow the plane from the nose for better takeoff/flight performance.

0:15 HECK YEAH! KENNYWOOD! Also the MOSFET is also know as a transistor and is opened a small amount of amperage, not voltage. Although, voltage is still needed to push amperage through a wire.

Instantly one of my favorite posts on yt. Thanks Tom.

well done😁 you made a electro magnetic rail gun 4:00

It is always something special to make a plane fly! This video made me wonder if the paper plane folding experts among your viewers might not have ideas for models that are able to remain longer in the sled, i.e get a greater acceleration.

If you want to make this much more efficient as a magnetic levitation device with controllable speed for a kind of train, check out how different maglev trains work (lots of interesting videos about this available on RU-vid). If you want to make this much more efficient in the aspect of "give it the quickest and most intensive acceleration you can with EM fields", check out some videos about railgun experiments (careful: needs a deadly amount of energy with a risk of fusing some parts together).

I really enjoy watching your channel, thank you

In this episode of "Tom Stanton invents stuff" He makes a railgun!

I've watched this 3 times today and every time I'm still impressed by your smooth segue into the sponsored content

Good Job. Had an idea to where a Projectile, Rod, Whatever would Run through the Center of a Series of Coils, and off would be controlled by Photo Detector Pair. Was thinking detector location would change as it accelerates? Glad to see this work. Thought a Gun Could be made, and a small magnet could hold steel ball in place so it wouldn't fall out if aimed below level.

This is a coil mass accelerator. This is also known as a coil gun or gauss gun. The aircraft carrier and disney uses a linear AC motor

"I made a paper airplane launcher" Shut up Tom, that's a coil gun.

why aren't the magnets spaced out further as you go towards the end? and have you thought about somehow taking the back emf generated from each coil as the field collapses whem you de-energise and using that to boost the power to the next coil?

I would add a catch and return system for the sled, allowing it to drop out from below the launched projectile, slide underneath the rail, and reset itself without launching the magnet. Alternatively, you could also hide a small disc magnet inside the nose of the paper airplane...

Really cool project

Tom: I suspect that if you also complete the magnetic circuit, (possibly by a 'C' loop of steel under each magnet pair), your total flux density will increase. Fun project BTW.

Some thoughts: You might be able to get more acceleration with different timings, also having 1 or 2 ahead of the sled on may have some boost as well. If you put some optical sensors across rail at the end and a U shaped thing for the sensors a bit out from the end that the opto sensors can give a real time speed indication.

Also you can polish metal parts to reduce the friction and probably improve speed slightly

this is my first video of yours ive watched but after watching it you gained one more subscriber for life

I also thought reversing the polarity of the coils the moment the sled passes them would double the speed😅 But apparently you were faster👌

Tom, that was so far the most interesting video I have watched on you channel. I would love to see a real Concorde (of course a model) starting from your rails!

You should have it pinch and drag it from the front and let go at the end of the track to get the full acceleration delivered to the plane. You can make a normally open tweezer mechanism to hold the plane that closes with an electromagnet that's powered only when the payload is still on the track

Great project!

0:21 Hey thats Kennywood!! Where’s my 412 gang at!

Wow a beautiful implementation.. The big difficulty with railguns is that as you get faster and longer the timing of the pulses gets shorter and more critical. This also means the power loading each coil unit needs gets higher too..(since it gets divided by time) Above a certain speed things start to get exotic very quickly. (over about 80 - 300 m/s) My own work was only crude and theoretical - with the idea of using a railgun like a rocket engine. Not really a good idea for about a dozen reasons, the killer being that it just took too much energy to ever work. Another being that the rocket 'exhaust' was rather dangerous.

This really helped me out, for my Science test. THANK YOU MAN!'

nice one. with tighter fittings and less vibing of the sled you might be able to improve performance drastically.