Some considerations on the high-speed driving of pneumatic cylinders

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 behaviour when a pneumatic cylinder is driven at a high speed. Thus, an analysis was conducted to investigate the cause of the 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. (English abstract)