Design And Experimental Research Into The Air Driven Gas Booster

Modern pneumatic technology formed in the early 70s. It's a professional technology which drive and control the mechanical movement with air compressor as power source and compressed air as the actuating medium. It's widely used in automation production. Air driven gas booster is an important part of a pneumatic system. Because of its advantage of using low pressure air as power, without electric power and lubrication, transporting high pressure gas efficiently and flexibility, it is a common and economical way to use air driven gas booster to provide local high-pressure for pneumatic system.Currently operating temperature of gas booster on the market is in the range of 0～100℃, therefore operating temperature will become a constraint when it is used in very cold area in the north of China. Operation temperature depends on the structure and materials of sealing components. At low temperature sealing components will become hard and lose elasticity which will debase the performance and cause leakage.This paper chooses air driven gas booster as the research object. Aiming at the problem of leakage because of the performance degradation of sealing components of air driven gas booster at low temperature, depending on the specific design specifications, starting from the application background, static analysis, theoretical calculation, structural and sealing design, we developed a low temperature gas booster prototype. The prototype's performance at low temperature was tested with experiment.First, this paper introduced working principle and the structure of air driven gas booster, analyzed the sealing structure and characteristics, and summarized the deficiencies of sealing structure. On this basis, a new sealing structure was determined. Depending on static analyzing we found out the structural parameters which were designed through theoretical calculations, and a prototype was designed and fabricated. Then, three typical experiments including low pressure gas collecting, high pressure supplement and gas charging were designed and carried out at room temperature and low temperature respectively. Room temperature experiments show that the structure of gas booster prototype is reasonable, and prototype performance is stable. Through comparing low temperature experiments with room temperature experiments, it can be seen that the prototype also has good sealing performance at low temperature. At low temperature experiments the prototype appeared some problems of large gas consumption and slow pressurization etc. The reason was found out from the temperature, processing accuracy and structure. These provide a basis for the improving the prototype.