Gravity Powered Generator With Gyroscope 'Sails'

[tim123]

If you want to move something through space you have to throw or to push some mass away, why not a gyroscope?

Hi Conrad,
  this isn't a reactionless drive... I'm not sure you've understood my design. Are you getting your threads confused? I really appreciate your input, but I don't see how it relates. Sorry if it's me being slow.

Regards
Tim

[conradelektro]

Hi Conrad,
  this isn't a reactionless drive... I'm not sure you've understood my design. Are you getting your threads confused? I really appreciate your input, but I don't see how it relates. Sorry if it's me being slow.

Regards
Tim

I understood your design, but it is difficult and time consuming to go through the dynamics and peculiarities of each design, so I fell back to  the general principles one has to go back to. The work to apply these general principles to your design I want to leave with you. 

I am not realy interested any more in all possible designes with gyroscopes. And I do not want to spend the time by studying each design. Dynamics is not easy to analyse and to formalise, I would have to go back to my books from university and to the ones I bought because of my errors.

What is a physical law?

It is not something you have to obey or you pay a fine. It is an observation in nature. And if many trustworthy people make the same observation again and again under many different circumstances one formulates this observation by help of mathematics and calls it a "physical law".

So, by saying you do not believe a "physical law" you doubt the observations of many trustworthy people. This is why it is so difficult to find people who want to discuss the physical laws.

Physics was able to reduce all verified observations into a rather small set of laws (or formulas). If someone builds a contraption or at least describes it, it is then a lot of work to reduce this design to the physical laws. And it is in principle the task of a designer or inventor to do that. It means he has to study physics for a very long time. And it is just that which most designers and inventors do not want to do. They want the world to prove them wrong.

Greetings, Conrad

[tim123]

I understood your design...

So, by saying you do not believe a "physical law" you doubt the observations of many trustworthy people. This is why it is so difficult to find people who want to discuss the physical laws.

Hi Conrad,
  I'm confused... You say you understood the design, and then you went on a polemic about breaking the known laws of physics...

Which laws of physics do you think the design breaks? The design is totally within the rules of physics - as far as I'm aware.

I'm certainly not claiming to know better than the physicists - so I must ask you again - are you getting your threads confused? You seem to think this is related to the M Drive thread. Please review.

Regards
Tim

[TinselKoala]

The design in the original post will turn the generator, if that's what you mean by "working". But as soon as the gyro arms are prevented from "wanting to fall" or "nodding", by pinning in the horizontal position, for example, the turning of the generator due to precession will stop. If the gyro rotors are heavy and moving fast, it can _appear_ that the "nodding" is stopped or is very slow, but if it is actually physically stopped then the precession stops too.

But what is really weird about these precession devices only happens when the device is _overdriven_ in the precession direction: that is, use the "generator" to drive the gyro assembly around _faster_ than it would normally go from just the precession of the gyros. Then the gyros will go _up_ just as Laithwaite showed in his demos, until they hit some restriction at the top of their arcs. The force to lift the gyros can be felt in the increased torque provided in the forced-precession direction... UNTIL the gyros reach a "top stop". At that point, the additional force in the precession direction _goes away_ and the gyros will remain at the top stop for as long as the speed in the precession direction is greater than the "natural" speed. Bearing friction will work to slow the "forced precession" rate but the gyros will remain up against the top stop. Once the precession slows down from the "forced" value to the "natural" value, then the gyros begin to "nod" again, driving the precession at its "natural" rate, which is constant, until the gyros reach the bottom travel stop. This behavior is really weird and needs to be experienced to be believed (by substituting a manual crank arrangement for the "generator" in the top drawing.) It's the closest thing to real "gyroscopic antigravity" that anyone has come yet, when that force you apply in the precession direction goes away as the gyros hit the top stop and stay there.

[tim123]

The design in the original post will turn the generator, if that's what you mean by "working". But as soon as the gyro arms are prevented from "wanting to fall" or "nodding", by pinning in the horizontal position, for example, the turning of the generator due to precession will stop.

Hi TK
  thanks for joining in. I understand what you're saying. As long as the gyros *can* drop - they'll precess. Once they hit the stops, they won't.

But what is really weird about these precession devices only happens when the device is _overdriven_ in the precession direction...

That is interesting. I'm not sure I can see an application for the effect you described, however...

Overdriving the device to lift the gyros periodically could solve the problem of them slowly dropping, but that then leads me on to wonder again about how much power a) could be derived from the device, and b) how much it would take to life the gyros by over-driving the rotor.

Wikipedia has equations defining the rate of precession, but nothing about torque...

Any thoughts?