Recycling Air

[usbcd36]

What you're describing won't actually help conserve pressure. The cylinders work by using a pressure difference to do work. If there's no difference in pressure between the air going into the cylinders and the air leaving them, they aren't going to move.

[vivek16]

Originally Posted by usbcd36

What you're describing won't actually help conserve pressure. The cylinders work by using a pressure difference to do work. If there's no difference in pressure between the air going into the cylinders and the air leaving them, they aren't going to move.

well said. the pistons actuate by creating high pressure on one side of a plate and the lower pressure acts as a vaccum and sucks the rod part of the piston out when working.

-vivek

[Mike AA]

IF you are worried that your battery would die within one match your robot needs to be made more efficient. Someone back a year or two ago figured you would have to run every motor at full speed to really worry about a battery problem.

-Mike

[gburlison]

If you want to conserve air, add a secondary regulator and use the lowest air pressure that will do the job. Remember that a 2 inch cylinder will produce over 170 pounds of force with 60psi of pressure. If you do not need this much force, use a smaller cylinder or less pressure. Just be sure to add in a safety factor.

[MailMan]

If you still want to recycle the air, I think the best way to do it would be to use the normal setup (compressor-air tank-regulator-solenoid-cylinder) then on the SMC solenoids they have exhaust ports from the cylinder, then put in a expansion tank such as the KOP air tanks, then you would have to somehow attach a hose fitting to the compressor’s air intake. The reason you would use the expansion tank is because the rate at which the air is coming out of the cylinder is greater than the rate at which the compressor is pumping.

This setup MAY let you pump air faster since the air is coming into the compressor pre-compressed. However, this would also take away power from your cylinders (thus requiring more air the extend the cylinder) making the entire effort pointless, and it would be a lot of work to mount the fittings on the compressor, let alone if it would pass Tech.