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This is my first draft of my ruby laser video! Not sure when I'll post it, but thought I'd let you guys see it first! 

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Giant 13kJ RUBY LASER CANNON! Test Shots and Overview!!

The massive pulsed ruby laser is complete! In this video I'm feeding the flashlamp about 13kJ, which is a ton of electrical energy. In fact, this is probably the strongest ruby laser on YouTube. More destruction to come soon! BIG thank you to Esco Optics for making me the mirrors for the laser. It turns out that finding mirrors that don't vaporize in a massive laser cavity like this is difficult, but coming up with the right coating was no problem for the Esco engineers. escooptics.com social media sillyness: instagram: https://www.instagram.com/styro.drake patreon: https://www.patreon.com/styropyro In this video I quickly go over the construction of this laser, and then do a few test shots with some plastic, a razor blade, and a glass bottle. The peak output power on this laser is around 50kW. Wanna see just how terrifying that power supply is? See it destroy stuff in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-4RE__iBgs The power supply uses a variac for adjustable voltage and feeds that into a pair of matched microwave oven transformers, From there the output is fed into a homemade Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier, which is capable of up to 20kV at a dangerously high current. That feeds into the capacitor bank, and then the laser can be fired using a trigger based on a car ignition coil and 555/MOSFET combo.

Comments

styropyro

well I went ahead and posted it. patrons got to see it about 30 minutes early...lol

Juniper_folf

How do you deal with the oscillations when discharging the capacitors into the flashlamp? When I built a 10 kJ annihilator and fired it into a coil, I couldn't stop the circuit from reversing polarity on the capacitors (which is probably not good for them) and any attempt to rectify it, no matter how robust diodes I used, resulted in exploded diodes :D Also, check the capacitors regularly, one of mine exploded rather violently...

styropyro

funny you ask this, because this was a big issue during my experimentation with making the power supply. in the final laser though, it isn't an issue. the plasma in the lamp extinguishes when the bank is still at a few hundred volts, so it doesn't reverse polarity. maybe my inductor helps, or maybe this is typical for a huge helical lamp like I'm using. I've smoked capacitors and a pile of huge diodes from slapping a metal bar across the output, and I couldn't find a way to stop it either.