The BIG Idea

I’ve spent decades waiting for an opportunity to work on a few projects. One project is a bit more complex than the others, but all of them require space and some machinery to complete. So, this is a video flashback of about 2 years to the setup of the workshop and where things are at this point in time.
While the first two projects are wind power related and I’ve talked about them before, the third, when complete could generate electricity from any reciprocating or oscillating type of movement. It might be by weight and pendulum, magnets and pendulum, or maybe as simple as being installed into a buoy floating in choppy water.

nice work on all those devices. how large did you build the folding vawt blades. I would really like to see the full scale set up of that running.

The folding vawt’s blades were only 24 inches tall. I built that one about 15 or 16 years ago and I didn’t have a video camera at the time. I still have the center shaft and the rims I made to hold the blades but most of the other pieces have been repurposed. It’s unfortunate that I have no video of it because the clatter it made was spectacular. Eventually I intend to revisit that Idea with other materials which may allow it to run silently or at least a minimal amount of noise. I’m thinking maybe carbon fiber with hinges that won’t allow the blades to close all of the way.

Hello,

Great suff my friend !

Alan

Nice Simpleman,
Pity you don't still have all the blades for you vawt prototype. Did you explore even lining the 'back side' of the blades with some 'wooden flooring underlay insulation' type material. I think carbon fibre would be the way to go. I had been looking at designing something with movable blades, but i thought about joining the blades to the shaft, through rods set within bearings, just to avoid fatigue. It does add weight, but it is close to the shaft(fulcrum). I think a second fixing point through a bearing at the top would help this tremendously or else a means of magnetically centralising the shaft(top & bottom) to make it almost frictionless, could enhance your power at the scalable level. I think a lot of energy is lost when these are unfixed at the top and wobble about a bit.

On your idea with the pendulum, i believe you would need to wind the mechanism up? How is this done? Would the energy you get out of it not be equal to the physical energy you put into it, winding it up. Apologies, but i haven't quite grasped the concept?

Glad you now have the time to take theses projects further. Really looking forward to your progress.

Regards
Jim.

On the full sized movable blade turbine, each blade had a single ¼ inch anodized aluminum axle which ran from the top mounting ring to the bottom. Each axle had a small amount of thread with nut and washer on top to keep the rod from falling through. Each end of the axle went through a brass bearing with a ¼ inch thrust bearing sitting between that and the resting points of each blade. The idea was to allow them to swing free, and that they did. But a lot of noise was produced from two impacts on each blade; one was the slamming closed of the blades, and the other was the popping open. The first attempt to quiet the flexy vawt was to place some self-stick padded tape on the backside edge of each blade to soften the blow. The second was to bolt in some adjustable knob like bumpers to prevent the blades from closing completely; this attempt had some positive results.

The turbine had morphed several times as I tinkered with it, and this photo was taken just as I started to break it down into pieces.


So then I turned my attention to the noise from the blades popping open. Once again I tried the self-stick padded tape with a little success. But to quiet the opening of the blades proved to be much trickier than the previous problem. I wanted the blades to fly open in the slightest breeze, just as they did before, without the loud thump when it opened completely. To understand what I did next you’ll need to know the shape of the original blades. The blades extended deeper into the body of the turbine than it appears. Each blade is nearly balanced at its pivot point, with its heavier half on the outside of the frame. So, I changed the axle to steel so I could add a hook with an eyelet to accommodate a spring, I also made an aluminum ear with an eyelet to hold the other end of the spring and placed it on the frames support rods. This way I could adjust the tension. The idea here was an experiment to see if I could control the extreme movements of the blades and to try to find a happy medium.
Everything to this point had helped some, and it would only clatter when a large gust of wind hit it, but it turned much slower. The weight of the turbine had become more than the bearings of the PMA could easily handle. At this point I no longer expected the turbine to become a fully operational product, but more of a guinea pig to try out other ideas. I tried putting weight at the back of the blades so that in tornadic wind speeds, centrifugal force might close the blades, essentially turning the turbine into a cylinder. This is also when I started playing with the idea of using magnets as bearings to relieve the burden on the PMA’s bearings. I had pondered on how to do that before, but I didn’t possess the machinery to make the parts. I know my way around many machines because of my work experience as a younger man, but at that point of time, anything that required tools larger than hand tools had to be sent out for machining. And that was simply beyond my budget if I needed it very often. This is the reason all progress stopped on all of the projects some 15 or 16 years ago, so I’ve been slowly acquiring the machines needed to startup again. While I am getting closer to it, I still need tooling for the machines I’ve got, and there are also still a couple machines on my wish list.

None of the parts in this photo are bolted, it is just to give you an idea of how I planed to use magnets as bearings for that particular PMA.


Now for “The Big Idea” or the reciprocation to rotation gearbox. My focus is more about the perfection of the gearbox itself; matching the gears, shaft sizes, bearings and the housing or body to hold it all together without losing the little bit of gear grease it needs to run smoothly. I didn’t explain it well in the video, but the gearbox should be able to drive a generator whose torque requirements are somewhat less than whatever force is driving it. Whether it’s being driven by cable, chain, or rack and pinion gears as an anchored buoy bobs up and down in choppy water, or on a tower being driven by weights. If you look at weight driven mechanical clocks, you’ll see a couple different methods of winding them. My coo-coo clock is wound by simply pulling down on the unweighted half of the chain until the weight is in its highest position. On a grandfather clock, it might require a key or handle to wind the weight to the top. Either way, the energy stored in the falling weight drives whatever mechanism or task you’re trying to accomplish. The idea is to use any weight required by the generator and gearing to run, which is within the capability of being lifted by human hands whether it be by pulling down on a chain or turning a crank. The weight itself would be guided by a rail to keep it from swinging in the wind. This is not for industry, this is for home use. I had shown this to a patent attorney years ago. All was well until I said, “any excess energy could be stored in batteries to run a small motor in order to rewind itself.” She called that perpetual motion and since perpetual motion cannot exist, I could not get a patent.

As far as any issue of scalability, that is usually a corporate concern and only used to milk money from all who would be dependent on power produced from it. All of my ideas are to empower the individual and free them from a lifetime of corporate dependence. If I had all the money I’ve ever spent on electricity, I could have retired by now or at least taken a vacation sometime during the last twenty years. As it is now, I’ll be working the rest of my life.
Necessity is the mother of invention! And I need brother, I need.

Simpleman, a lot of engineering went into the latest turbine incarnation, but you do have something workable, just needing refined. All about weight and material strength now. I'm sure that now you have the time, you can really progress this.

I'm still not convinced that the energy imparted in a winding mechanism or pulled weight in the 'big idea', would be sufficient to drive a generator, but neat gearbox.

Hi mate,

Thought this might have been of interest to you

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

Yes! Thanks! That is basically the idea behind using the pendulum and gear box in a dropped weight type system. I want to do the same thing with gears instead of chains, bike wheels and sprockets. The results would be similar but by adding the pendulum and gear box into the mix, it will slow the descent of the weight. The generator doesn't necessarily need to be attached to the gearbox. It could run off of a different sprocket and flywheel, but the metronome and gearbox would be used as a mechanically adjustable regulator for the system.

Could it be linked to a savonius in such a manner(since they can be made to produce lots of torque, but not much speed & by use of gearing), so that by a flip of a switch or a mechanical connection, the weight is hoisted by up again, say perhaps overnight while the wind blows? Just a thought !

That might be possible. Although my need which is the inspiration for this idea is based on my heavy use of electricity during the hot summer days in north Texas as I try to keep cool by way of air-conditioning. "My hope is that if I could make enough juice to keep-up with the electrical demand during the daytime, in the evening as the temperatures and power usage drops any unused power could then go into batteries which by morning, when triggered at the bottom of the cycle, an electric motor would raise the weight back into it's original starting position".
When I showed my little model to a patent attorney some 15 or 16 years ago along with a similar explanation of my plan to make it self winding. The attorney said, "That would make it a perpetual motion machine. And since perpetual motion is an impossibility, I could not get a patent on such a device." It made no difference to her that it cannot run without gravity. So, in fact it is NOT a perpetual motion machine. The second patent attorney I spoke with said the exact same thing. So without a patent I have no investors, and with no investors it's been sitting in a box.
I'm working toward getting back to it, but it takes time and money. The gear box itself should not be affected by that restriction of that patent rule. It's only job is to translate a reciprocating motion into rotational. But since both patent attorneys knew of my intentions they would no longer talk with me. Unless of course I was showing them a different device.

Best of luck anyways, if i come across anything else that might be of interest, i will post it for you.
Cheers
Jim