Gravity Motor Patent 7/10/08

[mondrasek]

TK, I look forward to seeing your work.  Unfortunately my connection here at work will not allow the pictures from where you are posting to load.  Any chance you can embed them in the forum like Clanzer is doing (and he did with mine)?  I wanted to show some co-workers your work.

[mondrasek]

TK!  Very slick.  I also like your nick!  Very fresh.

M.

[CLaNZeR]

1)  Centrifical force becomes more of a concern.  If the wheel is spinning too fast the magnets will not reach their target which is also true with the mechanical latch.  Both are RPM self regulating in this respect.  But if the wheel moved too slow they can hit their targets with too much force and bounce back.  Therefore you must design switch lengths for a specific RPM range.  The switches with latches are never limited by the wheel running slow at start up.

2)  The stator magnets are also attracted to whatever ferous end cap/target you use on the mass switches and slow the wheel.

3)  Centrifical force combines with gravity on the bottom but is against gravity on the top.  So the kick needed from the stator magnets is different on the top and bottom.  The length of the tube cannot be perfectly optimized for a given RPM.  Using the center latch allows me a broad band of RPMs to work with since I can always overshoot the latch with lttle or no negative effects.  However, the need for different upper and lower stator magnet forces may be overcome by placing the stator magnets at different distances away from the switches at 6 and 12 however.

It was because of these issues that I wanted to latch mechanically.  It is a more robust and forgiving design upon start up and can still be optimized with the proper load and stator magnet positioning.  And it had the effect of almost doubling the travel distance of the switch magnets in the 9-12 and 3-6 quadrants.

I believe the ultimate design will end up being to have two separate one way gravity latches at each end.  That way you could fire the switch magnet the entire length of the tube (easily more than the 8 1/2 inches in my build) and hold it there, not at only past a latch in the middle.  With this improvement all the light side magnets would be at the axel end of long switch tubes and all the heavy side magnets would be at the rim end of long switch tubes.  This would maximize available output torque, but would also require two latches per switch (more work to build in a prototype but not a problem for production devices).

Okay get what you are saying about the Centrifugal force and if it becomes a self runner then agree that at a certain RPM the effect will be removed, but this will make the wheel slow down, which then will make the effect kick back in, so self tuning really as it falls back into sync.

After just experiementing this weekend I can see that at a certain RPM the magnets are flown right to the stops on the slider and when you get past a certain speed the magnetic interactions are just not there. But what about a mechanical latch with two individual pins as you can on each tube as you says, that gets triggered when the magnet hits the Stop end and drops by gravity again?.

[CLaNZeR]

So much for me getting an early night.

Just had a thought.

What if the tubes were filled with a liquid/fluid of some sort that had the correct viscosity to allow the magnet to shoot upwards but slowly let it drift down, just enough time to get past the the 12:00 to 3:00 mark and the 6:00 to 6:45 mark.



Cheers

Sean.

[shakman]

I think one way to combat the centrifugal forces is by a "brute force" approach by incorporating an array of stator mags from 6-9 o'clock as Archer Quinn did in his Sword of God design.

I'm not sure what dentrimental effects this might have on the wheel, particularly at slow speeds, but one idea might be to have some smaller/weaker stators positions such that if the sliding magnet is above the latch the interaction with the stator is minimal, if it is below the latch (centrifugal forces at play) then there will be multiple repels fired at spaced intervals before gravity takes over (at which point if we're not past the latch we're probably screwed anyway).

Anyway, as always, a picture says a thousand words so I won't waffle on too much. Take a look and let me know what you think.

shakman

PS Clanzer/TK brilliant work so far guys!

EDIT: Removed incorrect pic