Air Cannon

[NoodleKnight]

Originally Posted by Michael223

I am working on building my own Air Cannon. I want to be able to fire multiple shots (of T-shirts), in a short period of time so recharging the cannon between shots needs to be done by either a CO2 tank like on a paintball gun or any other suggestions you might have. Does anyone know where any good Air Cannon designs are on the web? The ones I have found all need to be recharged between shots with either a bicycle pump or an air compressor. The idea is to be able to mount one of these on our old robot and create a promotional bot for high school football and basketball games to shoot our T-Shirts into the stands like they do at professional baseball games and other events. The simpler the solution the better. I am also working on designing a way to auto reload the cannon between shots. Thanks for the help!

How much CFM does it require to shoot off a T-shirt? I don't know the answer myself, but most CO2 paintball tanks don't have a large volume of air, but do have a lot of pressure (HPA tanks will go upwards of 800psi coming out the regulator). Now, if you grabbed a scuba tank size CO2 tank, then that should be plenty =D.

The first thing that comes to mind is just an ordinary pneumatic potato cannon setup, except you have a large HPA tank (scuba tank) with a regulator attatched, then feeding it into the air-storage tank of the pneumatic cannon. This way it'll recharge pretty quickly after you fire (and this is sort of how paintball guns work). Oh, last thing I'll note, I wouldn't use the setup I listed above with CO2 -- CO2 gets real cold when it's depressurized into a chamber, and PVC becomes brittle when cold.

Hope this helps.