A study on a silent, high energetic pneumatic generator based on catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide

Abstract

As the development of highly improved mechanical devices for use at outdoors, long operation time is required more and more. To increase the operation time, weight lightening and increment of energy density is required. Since the weight lightening is directly influenced by all hardware components, actuators, which are essential for the driving of the mechanical devices, are required to become lighter while maintaining perfor-mance. However, conventional electromagnetic motors show weak performance when scaled down, so weight lightening of the electromagnetic motor with same performance is hard to realize. To substitute electromagnetic motors, actuators utilizing smart materials such as PZT, SMA, and EAP are developed but obvious pros and cons of smart materials restrict their applications for general purposes. Pneumatic actuators have also appeared as alternatives too, but heavy and noisy compressor made them hard to utilize for portable purposes. Not only actuators, but also present battery systems have problems. Lithium polymer or lithium ion batteries are known to have highest energy density, but they inherently have explosive characteristic when fully charged. For that reason, charging circuits preventing full-charging are used or, in some cases other types of batteries such as Ni-Mh batteries are used despite of their lower energy density. To overcome such limitations, researches on novel actuators and chemical energy sources are receiving wide attention. Concerning on the problems, we focused on integrated actuator-energy source system, in which actuator carries chemical fuel as an energy source and converts chemical energy directly into the mechanical energy, which is similar to that of human muscle, which carries ATP as an energy source, and converts chemical energy of the ATP into the mechanical work. Moreover human muscle has high power-to-mass ratio, large displacement and fast reactivity. Motivated by human muscle, actuator system carrying fuel wit...