I have admired the functional simplicity of this device my father built on our rural property since the late 70's. I've been wondering lately if there is a way to build something similar to produce power but I'm not seeing it. That's probably because I'm too familiar with it and just not seeing it with new eyes.
It's very simple - it's a gate that is bumped open with a car or truck and closes itself after you drive through. I've been looking at gravity systems for a while now and it occurred to me that gravity is what drives this gate.
Look at the drawing in the attachment. It's purely mechanical so right now I'm just trying to identify the losses in the system. When you bump the gate open, a wire rope wraps around a fixed axle which, in effect, shortens the rope between the attachment points and raises the gate a small amount and puts more tension on the wire ropes. The gravity pulling down on the gate causes the wire rope to unwind from around the axle and pulls the gate back to its original position.
The energy in the bump that raises the gate overcomes gravity and the gravity pulls it back to its original position so I don't see a loss there. The same with the air pressure against the top of the gate - it feeds back in when the gate goes back down again.
So the losses I see are those of the friction between the gate hub rotating around the axle and the air resistance of the gate swinging out and then back.
What I've been thinking of lately is using an offset lever where the fence posts are shown to receive the inertia of the gate returning to the original position at one end, mutliply it by some factor to account for the losses by adjusting the pivot point, and transmit it back to the gate in the opposite direction for the next cycle. The lever would have some small amount of loss also.
If I can get that working them I'm thinking of possibly mounting a non-lugging generator between the axle and the gate hub and running the wires from the top of the fixed T-head out to where they can be used.
Any comments will be appreciated. What am I missing?
It's very simple - it's a gate that is bumped open with a car or truck and closes itself after you drive through. I've been looking at gravity systems for a while now and it occurred to me that gravity is what drives this gate.
Look at the drawing in the attachment. It's purely mechanical so right now I'm just trying to identify the losses in the system. When you bump the gate open, a wire rope wraps around a fixed axle which, in effect, shortens the rope between the attachment points and raises the gate a small amount and puts more tension on the wire ropes. The gravity pulling down on the gate causes the wire rope to unwind from around the axle and pulls the gate back to its original position.
The energy in the bump that raises the gate overcomes gravity and the gravity pulls it back to its original position so I don't see a loss there. The same with the air pressure against the top of the gate - it feeds back in when the gate goes back down again.
So the losses I see are those of the friction between the gate hub rotating around the axle and the air resistance of the gate swinging out and then back.
What I've been thinking of lately is using an offset lever where the fence posts are shown to receive the inertia of the gate returning to the original position at one end, mutliply it by some factor to account for the losses by adjusting the pivot point, and transmit it back to the gate in the opposite direction for the next cycle. The lever would have some small amount of loss also.
If I can get that working them I'm thinking of possibly mounting a non-lugging generator between the axle and the gate hub and running the wires from the top of the fixed T-head out to where they can be used.
Any comments will be appreciated. What am I missing?