Water Balloon Cannon Optimization

[ab500]

Hello everyone,

As a side project I am building a water balloon launcher with the support of my team. Currently I can launch balloons approximately 30 meters at aroudn 90psi and am looking for ways to optimize this distence. Here are the specs of the cannon:

-Air Chamber - 3ft 2"dia PVC pipe with value stem at end
-Valve - 24v 1" port spinkler valve
-Barrel - 2ft 3"dia PVC pipe
-Angle - 30-45 degrees approx.
-Pressure - 80-100psi currently
-Record Distences - 30meters approx.
-Control Mechinism - Wireless control system developed with a ATmel controller and a wifi point running dd-wrt.

Many of you might be concerned about my use of PVC pipe in this project for pressure applications. Let me assure you that we are being very safe about this. ABS plastic is unaviable locally in my area so we are working with the next best alternative. So far all of our testing has been done behind a .5" glass door approximately 10ft away from the device. For the final product we are going to drop the cannon into a 4-6" piece of drainage pipe in order to cetch any shratnal in the unlikely chance it explodes.

I'm looking to have a range of approximately 100-200 meters when finished. We have some pretty impressive ambitions for this project. We want to be able to do some basic balistic calculations and put the cannon on a two axis controller and motorize it so we can drop balloons on-command.

Any Suggestions? I know there are some physics geeks out there just dying to answer