Pneumatics - what do we do with exhaust air?

[Chris Fultz]

(you could alwasy loop it back into your system so that minimium ammount of air is lost if you are not using a compressor)

The system won't work this way - air moves from higher pressure to lower pressure. If you vent the exhaust to a storage device, it will be at a slightly lower pressure than the cylinder you just used. If you keep venting more and more air, eventually you will equalize the system pressures and nothing will move.

Unless you want to work another downstream cylinder at a lower pressure, and set up an elaborate system of check valves and pressure reliefs, you can't get more work out of the exhaust.

Let them vent, and don't even worry about putting fittings on - save the weight.

[Tim Delles]

After I posted, i realized that you would need check valves, therefore making it much more complicated (and i do believe unusable since i don't think you can use check valves on the robot)

Originally Posted by Chris Fultz

The system won't work this way - air moves from higher pressure to lower pressure. If you vent the exhaust to a storage device, it will be at a slightly lower pressure than the cylinder you just used. If you keep venting more and more air, eventually you will equalize the system pressures and nothing will move.

Unless you want to work another downstream cylinder at a lower pressure, and set up an elaborate system of check valves and pressure reliefs, you can't get more work out of the exhaust.

Let them vent, and don't even worry about putting fittings on - save the weight.

[Biff]

If you use the fittings with the little screw adjuster (flow control) you can affect the speed that a piston moves (somewhat) this can help in a situation where you want to slow down the piston if it is lifting something heavy while pushing but you want it to come back slower when pulling. Sorry don't have a good picture handy. Also not sure the flow control fittings are part of the kit this year.
Biff