Dangers of High Speed Pneumatic Gun

[neilpatel92]

I'm looking for advice from veteran teams and mentors on pneumatics since we are a 2nd year team.

Our team was planning on using a high speed pneumatic gun to hit the soccer balls with enough velocity so they would go over the ramp.

However recently we discovered by calling Bimba that after speeds of 20 in./s on a pneumatic cylinder, the cylinder will start to break down.

We've done the physics calculations and we need the speed of the pneumatic piston to be atleast 5 m/s to use it as a gun. Obviously we need more speed for the gun design, but we don't want the gun to break down in the middle of a game either.

Is there any way that we can prevent damage on these pistons, and slow the pistons at certain points during the shot to prevent damage? Is there any way to prevent damage completely?

Or should we just scrap the idea of a pneumatic gun?

_Neil