Simple and slow - Seans gravity wheel

[wattsup]

@STL

I have looked at your design for a few days now and there seems to be something you are taking for granted here that will inevitably make this design fail.

For the swing to happen from the 3 to 12 position, the swing has to move faster then the rotation of the wheel, so it does not only have to overcome the weight of the swing but also the counter force of the wheel turning counter clockwise.

If the elastic has to be week enough to bend at the 5 position and strong enough to retract at the 3 to 12 position, this in itself will not help overcome the rotation required to lift it at the 3 to 12 position.

I think one way to help overcome this is to connect each swing to their immediate opposites. So that the swing bending at the 5 position also helps lift the swing rising at the 3 to 12 position, or at least to help enough to take off some of the weight and use that bending energy to some helpfull use.

In any case, you have to be carefull because there is a very large world between the animation and the reality and being able to see the difference from the inventors perspective is usualy very difficult. From a scale of 1 to 10 on plausible success, I would give this a 7 so not bad.

[Scorpile]

Nice recreation. I have 3 concerns with your model though. First, why is there an extra rope going from tip of weight, to fulcrum of next weight, on the elastic side? Second, did you change the ropes on one side to elastic or did you leave all ropes as rope? Third why is the hinge for the weights offset to one side?

That's not an extra rope, that's a spring.  The other 2 are ropes without elasticity.  The hinge was only because i tough placing it there will stop the weight to move beyond and over the arms.

[xnonix]

Sorry to say, it stops (no air drag).

Here is the wm2d model with 7 arms. The springs are circular springs joints. You have a generic control for the springs K factor to change to tune up the system.
I have put a latch system that activates when the system try to go clockwise.

Mandatory screenshot and model.

xnonix

[hartiberlin]

@xnonix,
many thanks for these simulations.
Always enable air resistance, otherwise you will not see a realworld simulation.

Please can anybody tell me,
how I can lay a rope around a disc , so the rope
stays at the surface of the disc ?
Is this at all possible with WM2D ?
My ropes or pulleys always fall down in front ofthe disc.
I want to fix via a rope a weight to the outer rim of a disc and
it should wind up the rope, when the disc spins.
Is this somehow possible ?
I can not set a collide of a rope with the disc...
so this does not seem to work.
The only solution I can think of is design a small
chain from rectangular rods and use this as a rope.

Many thanks.
Regards, Stefan.

[Scorpile]

I've tryed a serie of smaller balls joined by ropes... like a chain of small balls... it works but the program seems to be extremally slow.

Now, about the air resistance... well... if we find a working model, we can construct a vaccum plexiglass chamber isn't it?