I’ve heard about them, but I can’t understand much about them at all. What could they be used for? How are they made? How do they work? The only info i was able to actually understand was that they can be used for military railguns and such, and they are very hard to make because we don’t have strong enough materials on earth to prevent them from flying apart. Can someone help me out?
In: Engineering
If you need A LOT of electricity (electrical energy) to be delivered all at once, you have a couple options:
1. Charge up a capacitor; the capacitor stores the energy as “static electricity”, basically two metal plates that charge up with electricity, separated by a very good plastic insulator to prevent the electricity from shorting out and discharging that way. This is what’s used for a camera’s flash, for example. The limitation is that we don’t have materials that are super-insulators; the electricity will arc through (like a lightning bolt) even the best of plastics, if you put in too much electricity, or if your dimensions are too thin due to miniaturization.
2. Use magnetism and motion. This is what a [compulsator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensated_pulsed_alternator) is: you spin up a heavy generator to as high a speed as your materials can handle, and when you connect the wires to it, it will deliver a shot of generated electricity, and spin down relatively fast due to the magnetic resistance that’s suddenly created. So things that spin very fast tend to pull themselves apart, so again we’re limited by materials and how much stress they can take.
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