styropyro
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first tests
🕑 Added 2025-08-20 16:32:54 +0000 UTCI finally got to blowing things up with the car battery bank. This clip shows the zinc boiling off of a 3/8" galvanized steel rod, shot at 4000 frames per second.
Unfortunately I'm dealing with mostly failures so far. The biggest is that the switch spring force is overcome by presumably a magnetic force, which limits the current to 55,000 amps. I did some napkin math on the expected forces a while back, and got some huge numbers that I didn't believe, mostly due to the major approximations I made. It looks like those were more correct than I thought! My options now are to either add enormous external springs, or rebuild the switch in a way that the magnetic forces close the switch instead of opening them. Both options are sketchy, and both are a lot of work! I think I'm more afraid of big springs than big lorentz forces though.
Shooting with the slow mo camera has been a nightmare too. Hopefully I can figure out some of the "quirks" before doing the bigger experiments. For the time being, I'm going to keep blowing up smaller things in order to get a better feel for the camera. This will also give me some time to plan how I'm going to modify the switch.
Comments
Ristomatti Airo
Mindblowing footage! 🤯
styropyro
c-clamps won't work for most things since the contact points are what ablate away first, which means the object being zapped gets smaller and the clamp loses hold. there may be scenarios where they can still help, but for most things they do not. i will be sure to take some footage of what i mean for this video
Wild Bill
A good way to hold down the copper blocks that I completely forgot would be using C clamps
Patrik
That preview shot is amazing alone as it is - the fps i high enough that it captures all the phases that the rod goes through and I've never seen anything like it. Exposure is on point as well! Regarding your other problem going for stiffer springs (guessing you'd need at least 4x of what you have now) and that doesn't seem sustainable. Would the force be mitigated if the cables came from the center of the bank in contrast to complete opposite? Maybe also tie the cables down with (slightly larger) tent poles similar regardless of the solution to avoid the jolt in the cables. I guess it would be a major rewiring job but would it be possible to negate the force by having the negative wires in some arrangement so they offset the repelling force?
Ella
Heehee kaboom!
Gunstick
At the steelworks, they had a short circuit on their electrical oven (it runs with electric arcs). The high voltage, high current cables were ripped out of the concrete by the lorenz forces.
