Perpetual motion?

[Gwandau]

Hey everybody,


here is some "holiday candy" to ponder if you feel for it.


Many years ago an old friend showed me something he told me nobody had seen before. He was earning his livelyhood by rebuilding heavy trucks into breakdown trucks and I had a great confidence in his technical ability and mechanical craftmansship.


He is not among us anymore, and I think it is OK to disclose it.  Actually I think he would have loved to disclose it at a forum like this.



This wheel turns as long as there is water in the tank causing the displacement of the weights.


According to my friend it turned for several weeks until too much water had evaporated and the displacement of the boats ended.
He also stressed that the water was neccessary, since the boats had to move forward somewhat by their own before getting lifted again by the engaging hook.



Would it not be possible to replace the water with a magnetic field creating same effect?
If magnetic repulsion worked, the wheel would theoretically not stop for hundreds of years.


Any thoughts on this?


Gwandau


edit: Maybe I should emphasize that the sketch is no more than a simplified guess made from a somewhat vague memory of the occasion, probably far from correct.

.

[Newton II]

Practically it is not possible to achieve that condition.  When boat enters from sideways on the surface of water,  it experiences upthrust (force) from water which holds the boat at that point itself.  Boat cannot overcome this upthrust to move forward and rest vertically on water.


I had tried this experiment in a different way.  I had made similar hook arrangement weights to rest on ground instead of water.  The potential energy gained by the wheel was not enough to overcome the reactive force of the ground.   It didnot  work. 

[Gwandau]

Practically it is not possible to achieve that condition.  When boat enters from sideways on the surface of water,  it experiences upthrust (force) from water which holds the boat at that point itself.  Boat cannot overcome this upthrust to move forward and rest vertically on water.

The effects of upthrust from water decreases proportionally with weight of boat as long as the differential in displaced water volume is small. You know when you were a kid and probably just like most of us played with boats in the bathtub and you found that some of the heavier ones with right shape and bouyancy could go quite far when pushed.

As I understand, you have actually not tested the water alternative or even considered the parameters to optimize movement of inertia, and still you declare it is beyond possibility?

That's not very scientific of you, my friend.

But in any case, I have neither pride nor ego invested in this memory of mine, it's just a nice old memory.

Regards,

Gwandau

[onthecuttingedge2005]

The effects of upthrust from water decreases proportionally with weight of boat as long as the differential in displaced water volume is small. You know when you were a kid and probably just like most of us played with boats in the bathtub and you found that some of the heavier ones with right shape and bouyancy could go quite far when pushed.

As I understand, you have actually not tested the water alternative or even considered the parameters to optimize movement of inertia, and still you declare it is beyond possibility?

That's not very scientific of you, my friend.

But in any case, I have neither pride nor ego invested in this memory of mine, it's just a nice old memory.

Regards,

Gwandau

perpetual motion has been around for 200 years and failed, where does it stop? it won't stop because of idiots who don't know when to stop.

[eatenbyagrue]

The effects of upthrust from water decreases proportionally with weight of boat as long as the differential in displaced water volume is small. You know when you were a kid and probably just like most of us played with boats in the bathtub and you found that some of the heavier ones with right shape and bouyancy could go quite far when pushed.

As I understand, you have actually not tested the water alternative or even considered the parameters to optimize movement of inertia, and still you declare it is beyond possibility?

That's not very scientific of you, my friend.

But in any case, I have neither pride nor ego invested in this memory of mine, it's just a nice old memory.

Regards,

Gwandau

Forget upthrust, friction, everything you are trying to consider.  This is impossible for the same reason all imbalanced wheels are impossible.  The device always seeks a balance, and gets it.  However you arrange the device, there is a midpoint, where all the levers are in balance, and there is nothing you can do to keep the device from reaching this point except to infuse energy.


Just think of a most basic unbalanced wheel.  One weight on the left, two weights on the right.  The two weights will fall and there will be two weights on the bottom, one on top.


Everything else is just a more complicated version of the above.  You can fiddle by adding more weight, suspending some weights in water, adding levers that make weights fall, but there is nothing you can add which will stop the heavier side from settling into equilibrium.