Highest Amperage Stun Gun

um, I am a licensed ham radio operator and also have a bit of an electrical/electronics education.

to sum up: at sea level given 100% humidity, the dielectric breakdown voltage of air is 10KV at 1 inch of Separation. Dryer air will have higher breakdown values. Now, if you can deliver 10 ma at 10kv over that inch, that will be about 100 watts of energy delivered over the approximate 10 Microseconds the pulse lasts. This is a realistic value. In order to pull 100 watts from a 9 volt batter, you would need to draw about 11 amps over 10 Microseconds. This is doable but the battery will not last very long. Most alkaline batteries will provide about 5 pulses before they effectively die. Rechargables (such as NiCAD, Li-ion or LIPO and lead acid) can deliver much more current and will tend to last a bit longer under full load.

Now, 10 KV will easily go through air or even through skin, but is effectively stopped by thick clothing (such as heavy leather). Now, between the laws of conservation, etc, accounting for losses, what you get out of the battery in terms of watts will be what you produce at the output. A suitable voltage and current for being able to deal with typical scenarios should be no more than 50 KV with 1 to 1.5 inch probe separation and at most about 25 MA max. However, since most batteries cannot produce that level of wattage, even over 10 Microseconds, an oscillator and high voltage capacitor are needed. The oscillator will feed a high voltage transformer to charge the cap. When it reaches full charge, it will discharge across the probes. btw, at 50KV and 25ma, you will still need approximately 12.4 KW. over 10 Microseconds. Since almost no small battery can deliver this it takes a bit of time to build up the level needed, which is why most stun devices can produce between 4 and 6 pulses per second. Of course, more batteries means more capability to deliver said wattage, but the key here is the high voltage cap. For reference, I have a 100 mw HeNe laser here with a 50,000 microfarad mylar cap rated at 50 KV. At full charge on that cap, the discharge would be enough to kill a full grown man instantly on contact with the skin in 3 vital areas. Most stun devices don't use a cap that big. so, voltage and current are often necessarily limited. Since the main power source is the limiting factor here, you are pretty much stuck with 5 ma and 50 KV at most. That is still effective enough to drop a full grown man..

btw, there is one poster on here who is a qualified electrical engineer and what he says can be taken as gospel. Ohms law, the law of conservation of energy and any other applicable physical laws apply and there is no bending them or violating them.

The STUN GUN is NOT measured in Voltage but Coulombs.
Technically it is supposed to be measure in Coulombs which is just a unit to measure charge like ampere-hours or milliamp-hours.
A Coulomb is how much charge flows in 1 second- it being
1 Ampere of Current X 1 Second.
So think of it as all the charge that flowed for a second.

This is why if you are looking at a Stun gun the Voltage number is BS when it says Hundreds or millions of volts.

As far as the 30,000V jumping a 1cm gap you guys need to refer to what is known as Paschen's law. Basically it is the math that describes the voltage needed to make the arc between 2 distances. This 30K volts everyone is talking about can change with variables such as Pressure or if it is in a vacuum.
So I believe the 1cm arc requires almost 30K volts
but a 2cm spacing needs only 50K to arc
What the issue is at a certain distance (far) it requires great voltage as you get closer and closer there is a spot where instead of needing less voltage the number increases again before it then decreases again.


These are estimates on the Voltage Required Not sure if accurate been a long time on this

Distances are in cm centimeters
Distance(cm) ---- Voltage /(arc)
0.5cm--15K Volts
0.75---22K Volts
0.90---26K
0.95---27.2K
0.98---28K
1.00---28.5K
1.10---31.1K
1.25---35K
1.5----41K
1.75---47.2K
2.00---53.3K
2.25---59.3K
2.50---65.2K
2.75---71.1K
3.00---77K
3.5---88K
4.00--100K
10.00---231K
13.00(1/2in) 300K
65 METERS - 97,500,000(97.5 Million V)
A typical lightning flash is about 300 million Volts and about 30,000 Amps

Could be wrong but if you have a million,a billion, or a zillion volts it will pass. Once it arcs, just like as if it was a physical copper wire, It will pass any voltage that is being transmitted.

There is no step down transformer between the electrodes.

Air is an insulator. You just have to increase voltage til it excesses the insulation value. If you take a copper wire with 120 volts but use wire rated for 1 volt insulation, odds are you will get a tingle because you exceeded the insulation rating.

I think what he is trying to say is it takes a MINIMUM of 30,000 volts to make the jump.

The phrase "It's the amps that kill, not the voltage", is extremely false and misleading. If I lead to you a 450KV high voltage transformer line, would you want to touch it? Of course you wouldn't. We know from Ohm's law that V = I*R or Voltage = Current * Resistance. If you put a lot of voltage across your body, you're going to feel it cause if you divide the voltage by the resistance of the body, you'll get the current that flows. Sure, it may only take a few milliamps across the body for you to feel pain, but you need a lot of voltage for that. If the more voltage you apply to an object of a fixed resistance, the more pain you will feel. Yes, amps are a measure of how much current runs through the body, but you couldn't have that current without a substantial amount of voltage.