Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Line
So now you need to look at how much flow rate you DO have, how much pressure and volume you DO have, and you can turn a shorter stroke into a longer one.
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I'm not a mechanical engineer, but here's what I've been pondering for the last few days. Perhaps someone who really knows can confirm or refute my hypothesis.
For a given pressure, the force you get from an actuator is proportional to the area of that actuator. The speed is inversely proportional to the volume of the actuator. You can trade force for speed with a lever arm of some sort, but
that is exactly what a smaller bore size does. You can quadruple your force by using a 2x larger bore size, but that reduces your speed by 4x. In short, the mechanical power of a pneumatic actuator is limited by the size of the tube and the air pressure. Both of these are dictated by the rules, as far as I understand.
If pneumatics alone can't do it, then a pure lever arm won't help. A carefully crafted kicking device might be able to do a better job than a straight pneumatic puncher, but only because it makes better use of the available power.