Ryan has started to lay out the P&ID for the plumbing system required for the gun. The gun will need two specific things in this regard: First, the gun's main pressure chamber must be pressurized with the supplied gas (nitrogen) to a controlled pressure and be sealed off with all the necessary safety checks and redundancies.
Second, the projectile will be held within the barrel by creating a vacuum between the back of the barrel and the projectile.
Ryan's initial P&ID can be found at the end of the post.
One thing we are still trying to figure out is the firing mechanism. We know that a solenoid valve will be used, however we are not sure where to place it. One idea was to have a separate piping system for the firing system that is connected to the gas source and using that, however another idea was to see if adding the solenoid valve to the vacuum system and introducing atmospheric pressure into the vacuum section would be enough of a "nudge". We will be looking more into this.
Also, we are working on the initial engineering drawings for the design. We will be posting pictures of the models soon.
We are also working on doing the gas dynamics equations related to the gas gun, which will help us pick design parameters such as pressure vessel volume, barrel length, and working pressures needed to reach our design velocities. We will be meeting with a professor that teaches gas dynamics to help us get a better understanding of how to approach the problem
By the end of this week we hope to have all the initial modeling and engineering drawings finished, as well as a final version of the P&ID.
