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PowerLabs Rail Gun 2.0 Research!

PowerLabs!Cornell-Dubilier Electronics.

 
 
 

 

 

 Warning:
WARNING: Do you like your eyesight? Are you familiar with all the proper safety precautions involved in dealing with a high power Laser? Do you have enough experience with High Voltage power supplies to build your own and not electrocute yourself? If not, then don't even THINK about starting a project like this. Class 4 LASERS are the most powerful and dangerous class of lasers, and they are certainly not toys; the beam will burn flesh and retinas faster than you can realize it, and even diffuse reflections can be very dangerous. This page is not meant as a how-to, but merely a documentary of how I went about constructing my own laser.
 

 

 Project Description and Goals:

 Every self respecting mad scientist needs a LASER. Personally, I have been fascinated by them for longer than I can remember. The idea of a light beam that can cut and burn things has to inspire both fear and admiration in anyone.
 Unfortunately for the general public, cutting lasers are, for the most part, Hollywood fiction. I have been fortunate enough to witness some pretty spectacular lasers in action, including green beam blinding flashlights (which, I believe, are in current use now), some industrial and research pulsed lasers, and, my favorite, the US Air force Airborne Chemical laser (which was supposed to be able to shoot down missiles from miles away, but in the demo I saw at Sandia merely bore a 4" hole through 1/4" acrylic), but when it comes to acquiring lasers, the most exciting thing I've been able to get my hands on was a green Laser Pointer, and even then I thought that it was too expensive and not worth buying.
 Until now... Thanks to a generous sponsorship from Plans and Kits Unlimited, PowerLabs now has a sealed 40Watt CO2 Laser tube at its disposal. CO2 lasers are amongst the most powerful lasers in use today, and find applications in cutting, engraving, drilling and various medical uses. A 40 watt beam should be powerful enough to start a fire many tens of meters away, for example.

 

 Theory (a simplified overview):

CO2 lasers work by exciting low pressure Carbon Dioxide gas between two mirrors, one of which is partially reflective and allows the beam to escape. Although their efficiency is amongst the highest of any gas discharge laser (circa 10%), a very large amount of heat is produced which must be dissipated. This is specially important because power output also drops as the tube heats up. Most CO2 lasers have a cooling jacket around the discharge tube.

(More to come)
 

Click here for the Cornell-Dubilier webpage, were you can buy capacitors such as these online.Power Supply and cooling:
The initial objective was to get it to lase QUICK. So a very simple setup was devised: Cooling is provided by an automotive windshield washer pump flowing distilled water in and out of a 1 gallon jug. The jug appears to have enough thermal mass to prevent overheating of the system during several minute runs. The pump, however, failed when running at 12 volts for an extended period of time. It may be safer to run it at 8Volts instead.
 The power supply currently consists of a 15kV 20mA solid state neon sign transformer fed through a full wave voltage doubler. The transformer failed after 4 minutes run time. More details on this later.
 

 Design overview:

Click the pictures to the left to see a nice overview of the design. No details yet since this is about to change very soon.
 

 Results!
Water pump on, let all the bubbles work themselves out of the system, double check beam path, beam stock, put safety goggles on, turn the transformer on, and YES! It WORKS!

 The power supply is too small for this laser and will have to be changed, but the tube did ionize and managed to burn a nice clean hole through some cardboard.

 More to follow soon.
 

 Links!
 
 

 Works Cited:
 
 

 Construction, Plans, Schematics, How-To, FAQ:
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