Time to check out posting to r.m.r with Google Groups after AOL killed
their newsgroup support:
First, for all that you hear about piston R&D projects--and you would
think there would be dozens of reports available covering every detail
of piston launchers--My literature search, both of my collection of
NARTS publications and on the web, turned up roughly a half-dozen
reports back in early July. There may be dozens of piston reports, but
they are not accessible.
None of the ones I could find said anything about pressure in the
piston. I was actually specifically looking for pressure data, because
my brother wanted to do an R&D on pressure. So much to our
astonishment, it was up to us to come up with some sort of measurement
of the pressure in a piston. We got numbers around the 5-10 psi
(gauge, of course) range. There are likely higher pressures
momentarily, as we only could look at pressures averaged over
fair-sized intervals.
I'm not aware of any pistons that have popped a seam because of
internal pressure.
I just finished putting up our R&D paper on my website this morning:
formatting link
I hope this is of use.
Peter Alway