A rolling cylinder and piezos

[DreamThinkBuild]

I think it's a good idea! I guess this thing can oscillate for a quite good time before completely stopping, no?

Friction of the fulcrum, springs and ball will stop it eventually. Simulations show it run for 3 or 4 cycles with all friction on, sometimes more when the spring settings are lower but more chaotic. The springs could possibly be replaced with magnets but would interfere with the steel ball, unless a heavy acrylic ball is used instead.

If the rolling surface is covered with piezos, the weight of ball will constantly deform the piezos, and that will create electricity...

In the sim it's a heavy steel ball so it should work at activating the piezos as long as the surface remains flat.

We just need to know if, after the system stops completely, the stored electricity in a bank of capacitors is enough to push the ball until one of the two ends of the device (left end or right end), in order to make it oscillate for as long as in the first attempt.

That is the real challenge. I've attached a small video of it, this is with air friction turned off. This simulates what it would look like if you could pulse a small coil/magnet near/attached to the end of the beam to keep it in oscillation.

I can't post the 340k video because the max attachment size is 300k. 

[DreamThinkBuild]

Sorry for the double post. Here is the video(flash format .flv) in a 2 part .rar file.

Is there no way to re-edit to add attachments?

[onthecuttingedge2005]

Sorry, forgot the image. Here it is:

do you see the incline? the incline only has as much kinetic energy as the highest point over time, a longer incline means that the object will roll slower over time, it doesn't contain anymore kinetic energy than the very height of incline.

a height of 1 meter with a falling incline of 1 foot has the same kinetic energy as a height of 1 meter with an incline of 1 mile. the difference is the rate of fall over time. the rate of fall is divided up.

if an object falls at 1 Newton straight down from 3 meters up it will have the same kinetic equivalent of an object falling at an incline of 1 mile who's height started at 1 meter up.

a lot of people are fooled by this illusion of distance over time.

[Rapadura]

But Jerry, when we are talking about piezos, we just need something rolling over the piezos, at any speed, to deform the piezos and generate electricity. Speed will not be important, we just need the "something" to deform a large amount of piezos. The larger the amount of piezos that are deformed, more electricity we can store in a capacitors bank. That's why I think it could be interesting to make the "something" travels the greater possible distance.

[Rapadura]

@DreamThinkBuild

Nice videos. But, the ball escapes from the device at the end? How could we prevent that?