Simulation on Pneumatic Cylinder Including Pipes.

Pneumatic pipes have a significant effect on the behavior of pneumatic cylinder systems. However, the influence of pipes on pneumatic cylinders has not been studied sufficiently. Up to now, pipes in pneumatic cylinder systems have been treated as a restriction using an equivalent effective area. This method does not consider the volume of the pipes or pressure propagation so that the motion time of a cylinder, which is very important for manufacturing products, can not be calculated correctly.This paper describes simulation of pneumatic cylinder systems including the influence of pipes between the electromagnetic valve and cylinder. A previous proposed model applied for the pneumatic pipe-chamber system is extended for applications in the simulation of pneumatic cylinder systems. Experiments were carried out with cylinders of different sizes and pipes of different lengths. The calculated results are in close agreement with the experimental results. The time motion can be obtained more precisely compared with effective area methods and the results show the effectiveness of the simulation.