Post : Shooting ping pong balls at Mach 1.2
URL : http://hackaday.com/2013/02/04/shooting-ping-pong-balls-at-mach-1-2/
Posted : February 4, 2013 at 10:00 am
Author : Brian Benchoff
Categories : news

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/ping20pong20gun.png

Next time you're in a Nerf gun battle, you better hope you've got this absurdly powerful ping pong ball gun (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/510286/how-to-build-a-supersonic-ping-pong-gun/) . It shoots common celluloid spheres at over 400 meters per second, or Mach 1.2.

This ping pong gun is the work of [Mark French], [Craig Zehrung], and [Jim Stratton] at Purdue University. As you would expect, the gun is powered by compressed air housed in a length of 3 inch schedule 80 PVC pipe. One end of the pressure vessel is sealed with a PVC end cap, while the other is closed off with a doubled up piece of duct tape to contain the pressure.

The interesting bit of the build is a de Laval nozzle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Laval_nozzle) between the pressure vessel and the barrel. Just like a rocket engine nozzle, this bit of machined PVC compresses the air coming through the burst duct tape seal and allows it to expand again, propelling the muzzle-loaded ping pong ball at supersonic speeds.

The guys have written a report on their gun, you can grab that over on arxiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.5188) .

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