Creamer Cannon
You might have seen the "Sawdust cannon" or "Creamer Cannon" on mythbusters,well I decided to make my own tiny version to play around with. The basic principal is the same as a pneumatic potato gun, except we'll be shooting dairy creamer instead of potatos. Also, since there doesn't really need to be much power to blow powder up in the air, I made the whole thing pretty small. The launcher consists of a 2"x6" pipe for the compression chamber (filled by a bike pump, last time I do that), a electronic sprinkler vavle, and a soup can with a hole in the bottom to connect to the out flow of the valve. The valve takes 24V to open, and luckily since I just built my power supply with +12V and -12V, all it took was hooking up to those two lines to get 24V to operate the valve. I also added a air pressure gauge for good messure to make iteasier to know when to stop pumping -.-
Here is how it works, non-dairy coffee creamer is very flammable, but as with any fuel, you need to mix it with oxygen to make it burn. That is the purpose of the launcher, to disperse the creamer into the air. You could lite the creamer just by sprinkling it over an open flame, but using the launcher gives me more control, and allows for much more volume of creamer to burn. For our ignition source, we set a butane torch up, so that the flame from the torch was right above the soup can.
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