Toad Elevating Moment

[MrVibrating]

...if we apply a clockwise torque of precisely 14.8 N-m to the flywheel, it spins up...

How do you intend to apply torque or spin to the flywheel?

Heh "by any of the known means"... all that matters is that the beam or main wheel effectively acts as the stator for the flyweight to torque against, thereby imparting the requisite pure moment in the form of the corresponding counter-torque.

However, again for clarity, an accelerating flywheel isn't required - that's not the only way to apply a pure moment. I just thought it would be an elegant convenience if the weight being counter-balanced by a pure moment produced its own counter-balancing pure moment, by way of being made to accelerate or decelerate.

But you could get the same effect by trying to unscrew a jammed bolt with a wrench, or screwdriver. The bolt doesn't need to rotate - rather, the pure moment is generated precisely because the bolt is stuck. So the PM is just a twisting force, here applied anywhere along the line horizontal to the applied load, and raised to sufficient magnitude to counter-balance it.

How much energy do you need to accomplish exactly that?

depends upon the resulting displacements - i'd intended to only cause an angular displacement of the flywheel, however it seems certain that the sim is also inadvertently applying an unequal opposite workload to the main wheel.

If this leads anywhere, then for certain it won't be viable to maintain the PM for a full rotation - Bessler didn't even have roller bearings, and besides, there won't be enough time for any significant spin up. Therefore the PM will need to be applied somewhat more judiciously, at the opportune time and place, presumably...

I guess one would think that if flywheels are the best way to produce this pure moment (they might not be), then thanks to conservation of angular momentum the RKE could be stored on an axially-mounted flywheel (ie. centered on the main wheel's axle, via a seperate bearing). Then the RKE could be shuttled back and forth between opposing flyweights via the third flywheel on the main axle - only the losses would need topping up, but if the mechanism was notionally lossless then the input energy would only need inputting for the first cycle - from thereon it could be kept in play, yielding consecutive outputs for no further inputs.

That's little more than speculation of course though..

A test rig could be to speed up a small motor which axle are pinned (fixed) to the main wheel.

Apart from that it's a very interesting subject ;-)

Though, two opposite and equal force - as mentioned in your linkpage - sounds much like Centrifugal opposing Centripetal forces.

Yep a motor could test that the effect works, although i don't doubt this. Measuring the energies is the tricky part, and most types of motor would complicate this i think..

And yes we have two equal opposite forces (at least in theory - WM2D may be doing it's own thang there). However the novelty is that this allows the point of application of a weight to be removed from the weight's actual location; even when it's suspended horizontally, orthogonal to the gravitational vector.

EDIT: Are the direction of rotation of the flywheel vs mainwheel significant?
If spinning the flywheel on a not-pinned main wheel are balanced (i.e. the gravity weight of the flywheel on the main wheel are cancelled out), then what makes the main wheel rotate?

regards
ruggero ;-)

Good question! That's precisely what i'm struggling to understand...

But yes, the directions are significant insofar that if the weight's downforce is doubled at 3 o'clock, then it's negated at 9 o'clock, and vice versa, depending on the start position and torque direction.

[Ed]

Try switching the masses around. Make the small wheel larger than the big wheel. Now run it.

WM2D models will start breaking apart when forces get too high. Something it's not even obvious, but it can then cause more OU results. Your small wheel's mass was .001, with no air resistance (not that in this case it mattered).

Also, keep air resistance set to Low, so you eventually don't get carried away thinking you have OU and forgot to turn it on.

You know how many times I've inverted G to see how a device would act upside down, and then forgot to restore G and thought I had something? Embarrassing! :-) That's why I created a gravity controller script for WM2D that I can use to place a "widget" into the sheet and see (and change) at a glance what G is set to.

I also advocate only using simulation software for testing a specific plan...not grand sessions of "trying sh*t". I think way too many people just sit and try stuff, hang a pendulum here or there and see if they have OU. Bad idea IMHO. Not that I'm saying you are doing any of that. ;-)

[Fletcher]

I rebuilt it MrV - it does appear to behave as your sim does ! BUT, I have no increase in RKE of the main wheel !

Note I added a few Input Controls & Outputs etc to keep track of things.

One of those Outputs I built is a special Polar Coordinate box that shows you the deviation from true North in radians & degrees [I sometimes use it for controlling timing of latches & catches etc] - it shows that the main wheel is moving down from the get-go when rotation is CCW - but holds position when rotation is CW, IINM.

See what your interpretation of the information is now, it may be different from mine & Ed's ?

ETA: sorry for the edits - doing this on the fly, with distractions.

NOTE: the torque is applied for 0.5 seconds - you can now see at a glance how much energy the flywheel has after 0.5 secs which means that at least that much energy was put into giving it that rotational speed etc - there is no air friction.

[MrVibrating]

@Ed and Fletch thanks for the feedback, will go over your posts tomorrow, spent this evening exploring further... racing ahead of myself but getting cleaner results now...



I think the previous sim can be binned for now, the design's a bit dodgy for various reasons - ie. to maximise inertia i placed four weights around the periphery of an unrealistically lightweight flywheel - the idea was to concentrate the mass around the perimeter, however i was then taking the energy reading from that 1mg wheel... dodgy. I did try comparing its RKE with and without the four smaller weights present, and thought it seemed OK, but in retrospect it's much neater to use WM2D's polygon tool to draw a one-peice flywheel; then we can have a bit more confidence in the results.


Tonight i ran tests on pure moment dynamics, with fascinating results:

I compared the rotational energy required to make a weight lift itself 180° from 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock, vs its translational GPE when dropped vertically back down the same distance - used a 1 meter beam so a 2m height.

- first i tried keeping the flywheel mass constant, while raising the input torque. The question was, does lifting with a higher PM force shorten the lift time and thus reduce the RKE required? Answer was no; linear relationship.

- then i tried raising the mass instead. Identical linear plot.

For both runs, torque and mass, i took 3 or 4 measurements: one at the exact balancing PM, then another at twice that torque, and then twice that again. Also tried x100 for mass, just to be sure. Near-perfect linearity.

- so then i tried keeping the mass constant, but varying the flyweight radius.

BIG non-linearity. OU, in fact.

As the radius increases, the RKE required to manifest the balancing PM DIVES. It goes right down, from eg. 27.3 J at 1 m radius, to 8.8 J at 2 m, and on down to a meagre 1.254 J at 6 m radius.

All for the same mass counterweight. Its GPE over 2 meters is 1.7 J - that's 550mj clear gain..!

So this is a symmetry break. By torquing a high-inertia weight it can be made to lift itself using less energy than its own GMH. Just a matter of increasing its radius...



Still, Bessler's weights were small cylinders, not 6 meter thick ones... so if the current findings bear any relation to what he was doing, there's more to this than unfeasibly wide flywheels...


The attached sim is pretty basic; shows an example of a weight lifting itself for 1.254 J, while an identical weight falls the same distance but clocking 1.7 J. The two smaller flyweights hanging on the wall are just spares from previous measurments (under-unity - they cost 27.3J and 8.8J respectively to raise themselves, for the same 1.7J when dropped again) .

Only half a Joule, but i wouldn't trade it for all the others in that previous sim... this is a much less ambigous measurement..!

[Fletcher]

V .. I think you are forgetting a couple of things.

1. The vertical attachment rod has mass so when it is in the up position [north] it has RKE aswell.

2. the polygon rod & the attachment rod both have increased GPE, which should be factored.

3. Force [albeit torque] is not energy.

Just my prelim observations - sim attached where I remade the polygons more accurately.

P.S. you could extend the attachment shaft so that it was pivoted in the middle [counterbalanced] so that you could remove the GPE gain from this in the energy budget.

[MrVibrating]

Yep was a bit premature there declaring OU, should've checked to total KE (inc. the GPE!) not just the RKE... and of course it adds to more than the GMH alone..... what got me excited though is the exponential drop in RKE as a function of radius.. could still be onto something here.

Will have to come back to this later, got work for now...

[MrVibrating]

Just grabbing a quick coffee break, no time, but need to fire off a quick suggestion:

Putting the latest findings together, we still have an implied symmetry break; we have a gravitational-inertial interaction having two different energies depending on the dimensions in which its measured.. this is a defining characteristic of a symmetry break, and can be used to create or destroy energy:

- the RKE of the flywheel required to manifest a self-balancing pure moment is in inverse proportion to its rot inertia; the further the rotating mass is from its axis of rotation, the less RKE is required for a given mass.

- although the GMH has to be added to this RKE when a weight is made to lift itself, this can instead be supplied by a second counter-balancing weight.

I'll sim this later, but for now, consider a horizontal balance beam with a central fulcrum... at each end is an equal mass, at equal distance - the system's at equilibrium. Then we torque one of the weights, producing a self-balancing moment. This leaves the beam overbalanced on the opposite side, which thus drops, lifting the rotating weight. If the rot. inertia is high enough, as demonstrated previously, then the RKE is less than the GMH.

Once the beam has turned 90° to vertical, we disengage the pure moment and the beam becomes perfectly balanced again, coasting back round to its start position. The difference between the RKE and GMH is free - using the last set of results, this gives 500mj per cycle.

Win?


ETA: just threw together a quick sim... seems to work, i get a clear gain on the balance beam... will try incorporating this into a self-looped mechanism later...

[MrVibrating]

Could really do with a donut around now... can anyone upload a toroid for me, or suggest how to make one? Need to be thin, with a wide radius (say a meter or so)... Need an optimised flywheel for testing this to its logical conclusion...

[Ed]

Go to this post and download the zip file. There is a script I created for making clutches in WM2D and it builds one dynamically. Try that and let me know if it works for you.

[ruggerodk]

Sorry for being an AH to spoil your coffee ...but you still have to spin up the flywheel - by 500mj
regards ruggero

[MrVibrating]

i would guess that net torque direction would depent on the direction of friction , if i understand the drawing (and i do not understand the tecnical jargon) .

because to me you are using the counter result of torque on a lever ( the same as a helicopters tail ) , without friction this would not happen if i were to imagine the situation . so i presume the initial direction of spin and friction would determine the direction .

but how would such a spin be produced ?

Sorry for the delay in answering, been so busy...

In the current reckoning friction doesn't yet feature - i'll include it once i get clearer energy readings, but don't want to muddy the waters just yet. I see what you mean about friction giving something to push against, however all we need in the current interaction is inertial exchanges - the masses push against eachother's resistance to accelerations.

If we take your helicopter tail analogy, we could swap the propeller for a heavy flywheel, and then when it torques up in one direction the tail would experience a lifting force, and when torqued in the opposite direction it would exert a downward force. The vertical force is the back-reaction to the accelerating / decelerating flywheel's mass.

What i'm finding now is that the wider the radius of that flywheel, for a given mass, the more vertical force we get for a given input energy - or, conversely, the less energy we need to input, for the same vertical force.

This means we can have a balance beem or wheel, with a torqued flywheel on one side, and a static counterweight on the other side. When the flywheel is stationary the system is balanced, but when we torque the flywheel the system is unbalanced.

Hence the crux of the matter is that the energy required for an accelerating flywheel to negate its own weight decreases as it gets wider, and thus beyond a certain threshold actually needs less energy than the resulting over-balancing energy of the beam or wheel.

The question of how to actually impart this spin is just a matter of engineering ingenuity - nothing too controversial about it, although a stator-less design would be nice (just for consistency with Bessler's denial of using one). However a stator-based mechanism is simple enough - i've experimented with various potential mechanisms in this thread already..

Whichever way it's done, the basic principle is to exchange energy between the main wheel and the internal flywheels.

So the main points again in bullet point:

- a flywheel only generates a vertical force when changing speed (faster or slower)

- the energy required to generate this force decreases as the flywheel gets wider

- thus the energy required to impart a torque to the wheel is decoupled from the resultant energy on the wheel. By 'decoupled' we mean that these two energies are independent and there's no causal requirement for them to be equal, unless the flywheel radius or moment of inertia is within a certain range.

As a counter-example, suppose we have a flywheel with a very narrow radius: it thus has a low rotational inertia (a low resistance to changes in speed), and so needs to be accelerated or decelerated that much harder to produce a given desired vertical force.. ie. it needs more work and energy to be done. However, the resulting overbalance on the wheel remains constant, hence if the flywheel is very small it might take orders of magnitude more energy to generate the overbalancing force, than the overbalancing force generates on the main wheel or beam! This would be a thermodynamic loss, in the same way as the inverse dynamic causes a gain..

To further simplify the dynamic here, suppose you're floating in space and you want to propel yourself in a certain direction. Perhaps your tether or EVA suit has failed and you want to apply a thrust towards your ship. You have a 10 kg toolbag with you, and the largest tool inside is a 1 kg wrench. If you throw the whole 10 kg toolbag in the opposite direction to the ship, you'll get the maximum kick towards it, for the minimum effort in terms of input energy. Whereas, if you just pull out the wrench and throw that instead, you'll need to lob it ten times harder to get the same impulse.

And so it's the same deal with the flywheel - we want it to have a high inertia, to maximise the amount of counter-torque it applies back to the system, while minimising the input energy required. With a higher-inertia wheel, we get a corresponding higher vertical force for the same input energy, and if the inertia is high enough, past a certain threshold the energy required dips below the resulting overbalancing energy generated on the main wheel or beam! The difference is then free.

Does that make sense?

[MrVibrating]

A couple is used to describe the
rotational effect of two equal forces
that do not share a line of action. {snip}

....

this is why i talked about a helicopter tail .
if i am off base i oppologize.

http://www.helistart.com/momentCouple.aspx

Nope you're bang-on, appologies for not responding sooner. And yes the helicopter analogy works, although it'd work beter in space... but i think you get the point..

[MrVibrating]

Try switching the masses around. Make the small wheel larger than the big wheel. Now run it.

...as i've been saying, higher inertia on the flywheel is better, likewise lower inertia on the main wheel.

WM2D models will start breaking apart when forces get too high. Something it's not even obvious, but it can then cause more OU results. Your small wheel's mass was .001, with no air resistance (not that in this case it mattered).

Yes, i upped the accuracy to mitigate the spontaneous disassembly at high speeds, and this is also another reason i'm trying one-peice flwheels. In a practical implementation though high angular speeds are unecessary, and significantly reduced by maximising the rot. inertia.

Also, keep air resistance set to Low, so you eventually don't get carried away thinking you have OU and forgot to turn it on.

You know how many times I've inverted G to see how a device would act upside down, and then forgot to restore G and thought I had something? Embarrassing! :-) That's why I created a gravity controller script for WM2D that I can use to place a "widget" into the sheet and see (and change) at a glance what G is set to.

Yep i'll add max air resistance later once i've got a full closed loop mechanism (if it progresses that far).

I also advocate only using simulation software for testing a specific plan...not grand sessions of "trying sh*t". I think way too many people just sit and try stuff, hang a pendulum here or there and see if they have OU. Bad idea IMHO. Not that I'm saying you are doing any of that. ;-)

You're right, though it's fun to doodle it usually ends in an over-elaborate paperweight.. However i'm just focused on specific measurements for now.

[Fletcher]

Here is a sim I built some time ago - I updated it with more Outputs etc - it might be of use to you & have some relevance when considering 'energy to spin' at higher inertia etc.

N.B. the gear ratio's are changed from 1:1 to 2:1 so the drive weight falls in the same time => I = mr^2.

[MrVibrating]

I rebuilt it MrV - it does appear to behave as your sim does ! BUT, I have no increase in RKE of the main wheel !

Note I added a few Input Controls & Outputs etc to keep track of things.

One of those Outputs I built is a special Polar Coordinate box that shows you the deviation from true North in radians & degrees [I sometimes use it for controlling timing of latches & catches etc] - it shows that the main wheel is moving down from the get-go when rotation is CCW - but holds position when rotation is CW, IINM.

See what your interpretation of the information is now, it may be different from mine & Ed's ?

ETA: sorry for the edits - doing this on the fly, with distractions.

NOTE: the torque is applied for 0.5 seconds - you can now see at a glance how much energy the flywheel has after 0.5 secs which means that at least that much energy was put into giving it that rotational speed etc - there is no air friction.

Really REALLY appreciate your efforts mate, unfortunately though both sims just crash in my version of WM. Shame. The sim i uploaded though is just an example for playing around with - in the clockwise condition there's supposed to be as little motion of the main wheel as possible, the point being to demonstrate that the accelerating flywheel can effectively counter-balance its own weight.

The trouble i had was when switching it to CCW, which causes the main wheel to rotate. The effective weight of the flywheel is doubled by the addition of the equal pure moment, at least at that horizontal position, and when it's turned 180° with the flywheel now on the left, the system is balanced again. So it's understandable why the wheel rotates - it's twice as heavy on one side as the other. The tricky question though is in determining how much of that energy on the main wheel has been input - ie. has any of it been conjured from nowhere, or is the summed RKE of both flywheel and main wheel all due to input energy? This seemed almost impossible to answer definitively since the input is in the form of torque, and the output is being read in the form of RKE..

So i've concluded that it's better to try and design the ambiguity out of the system, rather than try tease apart the input and output energies when they're so inextricably mixed.. Stilll, this is just trying to work around the confusion rather than solving it so any suggestions greatly appreciated...