Abstract
The demands for automation and energy-savings in various fields of industry have brought about an increasing need for pneumatic equipment. Pneumatic cylinders are used widely as low-cost actuators in various automatic assembly machines. Recently, high-speed pneumatic cylinders have become an important subject of research, with the demand to drive these automatic assembly machines at high-speeds.
In this report, a detailed examination using a numerical analysis is conducted to grasp the nature of driving pneumatic cylinders. From this result, it is found that the velocity response of the piston as well as the pressure response of the air in the cylinder chamber displays an oscillatory behavior when a pneumatic cylinder is driven at a high-speed. Thus, an analysis is conducted to investigate the cause of this oscillatory phenomenon, and an ideal driving method for obtaining high-speed is proposed. In this method, the application of this oscillatory phenomenon makes it possible for the velocity of the piston to be very low at the end of a pneumatic cylinder.
