We are pleased to announce a monograph "PROJEKTOWANIE I BADANIE ADAPTACYJNY PNEUMATYCZNYCH ABSORBERÓW ENERGII UDERZENIA" (in English: Designing and Investigation of Pneumatic Adaptive Absorbers), by Rafał Wiszowaty (IPPT Reports 3/2016).

The publication has been published in Polish.

The topic of the presented work is a method of an adaptive mechanical energy dissipation by the use of Pneumatic Adaptive Absorbers (PAA) – pneumatic cylinders intended for the use as bumpers that are capable of individual shaping of a braking process, dependently on the initial velocity and kinetic energy of the decelerated object. This shaping of the absorber reaction force control is aimed to minimise the maximal forces caused by the impact. In accordance with the chosen concept, the absorber consists of a cylinder with a piston and a piston rod, and is filled with a gas. Inside the piston is placed a piezoelectric valve having Hörbiger plates. The valve enables the real time flow control through the piston and – by that way – control the force of the gas interaction with the piston.

This book is focused on the PAA designing. In the developed pathway of the absorber design process a method of finding parameters describing the absorber structure (its geometry and pressure inside the cylinder before the impact) was first proposed. The problem of finite valve flow capacity was neglected here. In the following part of the text the limitation of the maximum object velocity was considered – at this stage mass flow rates were taken into account.

The piezovalve investigation is the subject of the subsequent section. In this part the majority of results concerns to the mass flow rate measurements by various valve and setup configurations.

Laboratory tests performed on the complete absorber were aimed to verify the good fitting of the results of numerical computations of thermodynamic processes in absorber chambers to the experimental data. Computations were carried on with the use of two different models: the former was formulated on the basis of assumption of polytropic exponent invariability, and the latter – on the basis of assumption of surface film conductance invariability and heat flux intensity dependency on the difference between gas and surrounding surfaces temperatures.

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