Dry Ice Cannon

Much improvements were done to the dry ice cannon in the past few days. Old version 1.0 is below.

As you can the only mechanism implemented on this was a simple one way valve to put in compressed air, and on one side a screw in cap which which was put in place to drop the dry ice from. But then we realized that the screw in cap was very leaky. After insane amounts of sealant that leak was fixed, but this rendered the cap pretty useless making it only work by compressed air, which was no fun.

The idea of removing that stupid cap and putting a large ball valve was finalized. The large screw in cap was removed, and a ball valve was put in, so you could put the dry ice in, and then close it. How easy rather than screwing in multiple times.

Here we have the cannon, the dry ice, and potatoes. Was a dumb idea to choose at night to test it, because we couldn’t see anything around, plus it was really hard to see how far the potatoes went. We could only calculate by the air time the potato got, which was about 6 seconds, or something very close to that. The maximum we tested was 110 PSI.

Poor tree, the raw potato took a bite out of it at 80 PSI. Now just imagine that traveling when the chamber had 200 PSI, drool.

The next version will most likely have the main valve (the green thing), hooked up to a electronic triggering system. Its a electronics solenoid driven sprinkler valve, so a simple current to it instantly opens it, right now we are using the small back up manual switch it has to trigger the cannon. Once we get the electronic trigger working, we can hopefully try 150+ PSIs in the cannon since no one wants to have that much pressure locked up in a cannon like that next to your body, so we can let it build up pressure and launch from a safe distance or watch a really huge explosion.

Not only is this just a cool cannon, but also a nice musical instrument. The air coming out slowly after the main valve is open makes a very deep sound after every launch. If you are into this kind of stuff, go build some form of launching device as well, we need some competition to test this against.