Eric Laithwaite's Talk on Gyroscopes w/ Demos

[TinselKoala]

Please see the image below.

The white thing on the right is a digital force gauge. The platform supporting the main "nod angle" pivot is on a linear bearing so it can slide a little bit out and in, and the gauge measures the centrifugal force wrt the vertical axis. The heavy gyro rotor is spun up by compressed air blast (nozzle and mount and pressure regulator not shown.) The electronics board is an Arduino with wi-fi and onboard battery so that the system can record and transmit wirelessly the measured parameters, which are 1) rotor RPM from an optical tachometer sensor; 2) centrifugal force from the force gauge; 3) rate and position around the vertical axis from a USDigital optical encoder; 4) "nod" angle from a sensitive servo-pot; 5) elapsed time.

The vertical axis is driven by a gearmotor and timing belt (nonslip toothed kind) and a one-way helicopter clutch bearing, so the gearmotor can be stopped and the rotation around the vertical axis can continue without undue drag. There is also a hand-crank arrangement (not shown) that can replace the gearmotor drive so that the experimenter can feel for himself the forces applied in the precession direction.

Good luck with your experiment. Be sure to incorporate some of the features of this apparatus, so that you can discover for yourself what I have discovered. Most especially you should include an upward travel stop for the nod angle, and a hand crank to drive it around the vertical axis so that you can feel for yourself the force required to force the precession... and so that you can feel what happens when the nod reaches the upward stop.  You should also have real-time monitoring of the rotor RPM -- which should _not_ be motor-driven during the experiment -- so that you can see just where the power comes from to achieve the various motions.

You don't really need sliprings. Your rotor should be quite heavy and on good bearings. The vertical axis should be locked while your motor spins up the rotor to sufficient speed, then the motor disconnected and the vertical axis unlocked. I generally spin up the 2 kg rotor to 4000 RPM to start, this allows nearly an hour of total spin time unpowered, and allows plenty of time for several "experimental runs" between 3500 rpm and 1500 rpm.  My apparatus has a pin on a spring that keeps the rotor shaft horizontal during spin-up, then until it lifts up a bit due to the forced precession applied by gearmotor or crank along the vertical axis, then the spring retracts the pin and the nod is free to go where it wants to go, between the lower stop (as shown in the photo) and the upper stop about the same angle above horizontal.

[Qwert]

Guys, are you aware of this? Proceed to 8:59:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNLk5G3hgRg

and corresponding patent:

http://www.google.com/patents/US6705174
https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US6705174.pdf

Looks like a gyroscope doesn't have to be mechanical in traditional meaning of a flywheel. This one uses electromagnetic field.

[TinselKoala]

According to what I can read in the patent and the descriptions of the drawings, this system is a set of tubes or channels that contain within them a heavy rotating mass: in other words, an electromagnetically driven rotor. It's a flywheel, or set of flywheels, without axles. This makes it possible to construct the system with three orthogonal planes of rotation, something that is hard to do with flywheels on axles.
It's a good patent, an interesting system, but it still works by having heavy masses rotating in a plane, or several planes.

[Qwert]

Yes, TK. You are right; as always anyway (b'coz you don't use shortcuts... er... like us) . Though my description above is not very precise, I meant just that. And I was wrong. Sorry; I promise to read in the future to avoid such "revelations".

The gyroscope configuration mentioned in that video was invented by Léon Foucault in 1852. Here's more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope

[ingyenenergiagep]

UFO mecha prop