An electro-magnetic ballistic launching mechanism is a much more practical project than an electro-magnetic "can crusher" that has almost no practical application and demonstrates very little physics.
Perhaps it isn't Politically Correct to use the word "gun" in a high school educational context, but this ignores the reality to which some of your "honors" physics students will eventually be exposed in a higher education environment. The so-called Military-Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned us about is very much deeply embedded within the hallowed halls of academia... going back to the World War II era, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States of America out of an isolationist stupor, universities have been critical to developing the complex weapon systems needed to defend our country from aggressors and to wage war. The history of weapons development, and its association with higher learning, goes back a lot further, but WWII marked a turning point in the integration of academia and industrialization of weapons manufacturing.
From the MIT Radiation Laboratory work on radar microwaves, to the Manhattan Project's development of the atomic bomb, the USA has relied on top talents from both academia and industry to "bring home the bacon" to feed our national defense. I am hardly in that "top talent" category, but I have worked throughout my career with some pretty damned smart people who knew how to "get things done." This is not a talent that is taught in college. It is developed in the field through experience, helped along by those who came before.
A colleague,
Hallock Freeman Swift, was involved in developing hyper-velocity "guns" to test whether or not astronauts could survive meteorite impacts while exploring outer space back in the 1960s to 1970s. Eventually this led to his involvement in electro-magnetic rail guns, and
the Navy has since developed a version to be deployed "real soon now" on warships. Hal once bragged to me that the device he was currently working on in California could launch "one pound to Jupiter," which I presume was his boisterous way of saying the gun could accelerate a payload weighing one pound on Earth to escape velocity. How it was to be navigated to Jupiter was an exercise left for the student. Hal was big on grandiose ideas, but he also knew how to hire people who could get things done and make his ideas a reality.
There has been some speculation that rail-gun technology could prove useful in launching micro-satellites into low-earth-orbit (LEO) for environmental monitoring. Your physics students might be interested in learning that the smaller integrated circuits become, the more resistant the circuits become to acceleration damages. It would be an interesting exercise to compute the acceleration required to place a payload into NEO using a "practical" rail-gun length of, say, one hundred meters. Also, what would the discharge current profile have to be? What would the muzzle velocity need to be to breach the Earth's atmosphere and still maintain enough momentum to settle into orbit?
In Dayton, OH,
Joe Rosenkranz owns a machine shop, Miami Valley Manufacturing & Assembly, that has been performing CNC machining of aluminum projectiles for the Navy "rail gun" test bed at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, VA. The ones that I saw being manufactured, sometime around 2013 IIRC, were considerably larger than one pound, being more or less cube-shaped with dimensions on the order of twenty inches on a side. There are
web videos available showing this "big dog" barking and making LARGE holes in armor plate steel slabs... several in succession.
My point is this: Political correctness aside, your students will learn a hell of lot more applied physics by building a small rail gun than they ever will building a can crusher. It doesn't have to be a hyper-velocity rail gun either to demonstrate the electro-magnetic principles involved. And it doesn't have to use thousands of microfarads, charged with thousands of volts, to produce an effective acceleration current. Most importantly, a successful demonstration will require a team effort. It isn't a one-man-band kind of project, buy it will require a goof leader to recognize design problems and assign apprpriate students to the task of solving those problems.
For extra credit, there could be a ballistic computation team whose job is to adjust elevation and azimuth direction to allow a projectile to land within a target bucket, say, twelve inches diameter a hundred feet away.
