This is a quick demonstration of my electrothermal gun that I've been working on. An electrothermal gun is an electrically powered weapon that uses electricity to resistance heat and vaporize a working medium into a high pressure high temperature plasma arc. This high pressure plasma accelerates a projectile down the barrel similar to an air gun. If you've ever seen videos of arc flash explosions or capacitor discharge exploding wires, that's what's happening inside the chamber. There is no gun powder anywhere, simply a small piece of aluminum foil to start the arc. Note that when googling electrothermal gun the wikipedia article only talks about electrothermal-chemical guns, that use the electrical explosion to ignite conventional propellant more rapidly, which is not what's happening here. This is purely electrical energy into heat into hot pressurized gas/plasma.

The rifle is 0.375in caliber, bolt action. It uses a 10,000uF 450Volt capacitor, for a storage energy of approximately 1000Joules. This is about the energy of running a microwave for 1 second. I designed and built the bolt action mechanism myself over the course of about two months. It's fully functional with cock on open contact, an extractor, and an ejector.

My biggest issue so far has been the cartridge welding to the electrical contacts. There are massive currents flowing, and the slightest bit of resistance quickly turns into melted metal. There are still plenty of issues to work out and improvements to be made. So I hope to make more videos in the future.

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