In designing a flywheel shooter with my students I've come across something I'm sure many of you have or will discover. Spin causes some pretty weird things to happen to the fuel as they are in flight to their destination.
What I'm looking to do is increase consistency in my shots and I've already got pretty tight control of the RPM of the flywheel.
This suggestion was mentioned by another mentor that works with my team and I wanted to pass it along for thought and clarification as I work today.
Apparently when you use a flywheel shooter with just a backplate as the arc/curve you lose some of the energy and get less consistent flight paths with the balls because some of the energy you are trying to impart on the ball as kinectic energy is lost as rotational energy....ie spin on the ball. So the idea is instead of having a curve of plastic you instead have a arc made up of a bunch of small wheels, rollers, something of that sort so that you balance out the rotational energy and the ball simply flys up with no backspin....which could be a good thing especially with the fuel balls. The only reference design where I noticed a team had thought of this and were succesfully able to counteract the spin from their flywheel was team 1717 in 2014.
https://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/im...fe76bdff_l.jpg
I'm not an ME so I hope I'm not explaining things too incorrectly, but I thought this was interesting.