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Unread 07-02-2010, 13:38
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dtengineering dtengineering is offline
Teaching Teachers to Teach Tech
AKA: Jason Brett
no team (British Columbia FRC teams)
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Re: building an energy conserving pneumatic system

While physics prevents you from getting more energy out of a system than you put into it, there are ways that you can conserve the energy in a pressurized system by extracting that energy more efficiently.

One example is the double (or triple) expansion steam engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_e...ansion_engines where the exhaust from the high pressure cylinder is used to feed a lower pressure cylinder. I wouldn't recommend this for an FRC robot's pneumatic system, but it is interesting to know about from a themodynamics standpoint.

Jason

P.S. While I was looking for a good link to explain multiple expansion engines, I stumbled upon this site: http://www.animatedengines.com/index.shtml where someone has taken a lot of time to show off how a number of different engines (including several variations of Stirling Cycle engines) work.