Sjack Abeling Gravity Wheel and the Worlds first Weight Power Plant

[Omnibus]

@Jubjub,

Trying to figure out what’s going on in your sim. Animation>Reactor>Utilities>Analyze World gives me too low density for the dumbbells. So, I changed the Mass 200 you’ve given to 2000. Also, the Mass 1000000 which you’ve given to the wheel seemed too high but the program doesn’t seem to feel a Mass less than about 100000 is acceptable so that’s what I changed it to. What the dimension of this quantity Mass is, I couldn’t find. With these changes the simulation works just as fine.

However, as I said before, you’ve given Friction the value of 0.0 to the wheel. When I changed that to Friction 1.0, as is the value assigned to the dumbbells, the wheel sways around equilibrium and doesn make turns any more. One of the dumbbells, at that, behaves strangely seemingly hanging in the air, so the program is doing something funny under these conditions. As I said before, ideally non-elastic conditions are assumed and I left that for now. If you change that to Elasticity 1.0 (ideally elastic) the setup explodes. Again, I’m still not clear as to what thee different Simulation Geometries are all about but, say, Bounding Box leads to the construction collapsing (the analysis window says bodies are interpenetrating). Same with the Bounding Sphere and Mesh Concave Hull. That’s for now. Will see tomorrow what else I can do with this analysis.

[ruggero]

@ruggero and everyone else who doesn’t have wm2d, here’s a vid of a simulation with @Rusty’s type of a motor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf37W1C4uzc. ......

I really appreciate your concern for the rest of us (mac-users etc.)...;-)

But this link gives an error at YouTube: "The URL contained a malformed video ID."

ruggero  ‚-)

[Jubjub]

Tonight I'll see if I have the time to make a new model. The former wheel "GravEng8-1" was not in scale - That is, I have no idea how big or small it is
I'm thinking about making a wheel with the same configuration as Dustys last video to see if it will simulate.

As for the different simulation geometries (@ Omibus) don't tamper with those, they are exactly what they are supposed to be. If you change it to bounding box as you said, the simulator will make calculations from the objects as boxes which we don't want. Concave or convex? Under tools you can test if an object is either - I have allready done so. And for the "mesh" it simply means that it will simulate the objects as they are built, with all their little creases and so on.

@Eric,
Thanks for your offer, but the current video took me under half an hour to render - Admitted, I didn't use final gather, real materials, textures or anything heavy.


Oh, there will be no dxf's of the current setup - But I will keep it in mind for the next one 
(Any particular version of dxf?)

[ruggero]

Dusty,

I'm amazed by your craftmanship: Your live models and tests are terrific and show us a lot of real-life issues to take into consideration.

Though...I've noticed that your curve design on the guided track differ from Abeling's original.( see my drawing: Abelings = black line, Dustys = red line)
Is there a reason to that?

From what I see you could easily tilt your existing curves to match Abeling's (see green line on drawing).
If you could do a demonstration on that, I think you will see the weight going further to the top-point. (I'd love to see that on video) ;-)

Also, I believe it of great importance that the "entrance" to the track at 05:00 are as smooth as possible, to prevent impact that slow down the wheel.

ruggero  ;-)

[Omnibus]

@ruggero,

Try this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf37W1C4uzc&feature=channel_page

Sorry about that. Probably I gave the link too soon before the youtube processing had completed. The link in the initial post is also corrected.