A study on a compressed gas generator using pressure feedback and gravity based on catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide

Abstract

In this dissertation, a newly designed mechanism for generating a highly compressed and large quantity gas is presented. As the increment in the need of pneumatically actuated mobile robots due to its high power per weight and compliance, many kinds of pneumatically operated robots have been developed to make it comfortable to operate for human with enough power. However, the available compressors on a market tend to be bulky, noisy, and heavy and no one even wants to take a vibrator on one’s back though it help a lot doing difficult tasks, for example simple walking for the disable or lifting heavy substance for the older. This would be good motivations to develop the pneumatic generator that needs to not only perform well generating a highly compressed gas but also be quite, compact, and no vibration. With respect to its performance of compressors, the commercial compressor has its limited maximum pressure due to its motor power, which means the bigger motor is taken, the higher pressure could be generated in a reservoir. There have been researches to get high pressure with a relatively small reservoir because it can store large energy within a compact design using highly compressed nitrogen gas in a fuel tank. In this case, the pre-stored inert gas energy is used for injection of hydrogen peroxide overcoming the back pressure of a reactor but this would make it difficult to refuel hydrogen peroxide without a nitrogen gas tank in a field of operation. Other approach have been investigated to make a compressor less noisy and vibrational so that a human could be more comfortable with the interaction of wearable robots. The commercially available motor-driven compressor has reduced noise and vibration a lot more than the conventional engine-based compressor which is heavy and noisy with lots of vibration. However, this could not only perform the pressure and gas flow rate as high as other compressors can achieve but also operate with some noise and vibration wh...