Abstract
Compared with hydraulic systems, the positional control of pneumatic systems is much more difficult because of the high compressibility of air. A pneumatic system, in which several cylinders are connected with each other in series, can be used to acquire a reliable and accurate positional control at the high speed. Especially it is interested when the stroke of each cylinder in some unit varies in a sequence of 2 powered integers starting from 0, the total output displacements of the system could be any integer in this unit from 0 to N2-1 where N is the number of cylinders.
In this research, the ON-OFF actions of each cylinder was controlled by a microcomputer, and a triangular shaped digital output has been taken as an example. This paper reports the dynamic characteristics of such systems investigated by computer simulation.
