Hi Robert, just a quick reminder about variable transmissions, in the mid to late 70s Daf/volvo produced a little car with this variable transmission the Daf 66. This little car was around for some years as i recall. I remember working in a scrapyard in them days and we had broken several them the old belt variable drive which was so different at the time, just thought you may be interested. Very informative and interesting videos most enjoyable.
Wow! I cant believe the effort you put into this chanel, we get quality content almost every single day, I don't know where you manage to find the time and ideas!
Off topic I love your channel it reminds me of my grandads shed when I was a kid he would show me tinkering and fixing machines for poor people in the neighbourhood. Thank you and I appreciate you. 🙏💙
amazing that you should make this video right now! i've spent the last few days dreaming up a very similar solution to the ratchet, using one way bearings and chain and sprocket instead of the pawl, to build a velomobile with linear 'pedalling' mechanics. the infinitely variable transmission is an incredibly inspiring and appealing addition to the equation. THANK YOU! i'll have to think about how i might be able to add it in. in my application, a further addition of a simple pendulum linkage could adjust the gearing automatically based on the elevation gradient. all mechanically controlled. wild and amazing! thank you for being such an inspiration Rob!
Hi Robert, I live in rural South Australia, and I have both solar and wind. If I had wind only I would need a massive battery bank to bridge the power divide. My 15 Kw solar array charges my car runs the house and charges my 8 kw battery bank. Even a massive turbine wouldn't be cost effective as my wind resource is just too intimiternt, as you say it's horses for courses, the best solution for me was cheap second hand panels and Lifepo4 batteries. The wind comes in handy on the occasional night when wind speed is high. It's about one night a month. Love your video, all the best, one old tinkerer to another.
the ratchetting system a wonderful example of mechanical 3-phase power transmission... (x2 for continuous bidirectonal linear translation converted to continuous rotation).
In the 1970’s a TV show air in Sydney Australia demonstrated a ACVT that was a liquid. When a voltage was passed through it it would start to become solid. The liquid was placed between two plates. One plate was the drive plate and the other was the driven plate. With no voltage applied the driven plate will not turn when the drive plate rotates. As the voltage is increased the liquid becomes more viscous and the driven plates starts to turn. If the weight placed on the driven plate is too great the liquid “breaks” marginally, the driven plate slows. Increase the voltage the liquid becomes even more viscous transmitting more rotational effort from the drive. Eventually, the voltage passing through the liquid causes the liquid to become a solid and totally variable. The weight that could be lifted, pushes or pulled is relative to the diameter of the plates. It showed a demo of this ACTV device connected to a crane it was able to lift and hold a 1 imperial ton load. The other advantage was it ability to dissipate heat be cause the liquid surrounding the two plates was still a liquid and thus easily cooled via a radiator. I wonder what happened to it.
Either it was too expensive to manufacture, or it might have been a suspension that separated over time, thixotropically, or under shear strain. Shear thinning or shear thickening are by definition, non-newtonian behavior of susceptible fluids.
Sorry to rabbit on, but it occurs to me that if a system had two stable fluid transmission systems, one with a shear thinning fluid, and another with a shear thickening fluid, it could be dialed in to be self-regulating on power output without any sort of external governor. If the fluids were immiscible, and had a density difference, perhaps they could even be contained within the same apparatus.
@@grunwode No, in simple terms there is just one container. The two plates are immersed in the fluid. Only that fluid that is between the plates is affected. A low voltage affects only a small portion of the fluid and,as the voltage is increased more fluid between the plates is affected. The fluid that is not between the plates circulates about the container from the rotation of the plates. The container is the radiator. The object is; the rotation of drive and driven is 1:1 that would equate to “final drive” with the differential would as it it is presently provide the final gearing as it presently does in motor vehicles. If driven plate is rotating slower that the drive plate, a greater voltage is applied to the plates. A sedan would have a smaller plate than a truck. While different levels of voltage would be available the car and truck.
I liked the angle shifting transmission mechanism that was shown earlier. That would probably be compatible with the spring-loaded tail assembly dampener of the old Aeromotor type mechanical windpumps. However, I'm not sure if one would want the demand to control the transmission, or the supply. The variance in supply on a windmill can change very quickly.
- however friction devices - have drawbacks - though the friction element can act as a mechanical fuse - preventing the system from self destruction... pro's and cons..
Looks like a 'Walschaerts valve gear' to me which was a ctv for steam engines that also provided a reverse phase, so it had maximum power or efficiency going forward or reverse without disengaging from the engines power.
Wow, i am on ebike project. I have that one way gear and i think i could control the ratio since i use microcontroller. I also got ir distance sensor to read the pin position. It ll be e-cvt😮
- h ha - ever since the original honda odessy (or was there an earlier incarnation - ok, yes it goes all the way back to the steal and wind age.... lol, the old becomes new again.
Was looking for ways to couple a rotary or vertical vane to measure and automatically adjust the dual cone commutator. Any ideas that are super finessed? Would need gravity or tension or magnetics to hold in base start ratio. Would be nice if it could increase power to alternator coils simultaneously to increase output and resistance. Just thought of centrifugal mass pulling at a 90 lifting the "golf ball" Thanks
Instead of skate bearings you can use flanged sintered bronze bushes, in fact plain bearings, which are simpler, smaller, easier to fit and often cheaper in acquisition and maintenance.
I would go so far and use something like iGlide filament, and then print whatever bearing surfaces I needed. I bet with the size of his channel Igus would send him a pile of 3DP filament materials samples. They're always interested in new applications/markets for their materials - some would say this is a pretty good sized and fairly captive market for the channel; modern vendors realize and foster that.
@@russellzauner My experience with Igus bushings is mediocre: fragile, broke often when inserting, &c. Printing them ? Maybe with a multi-head, i.e., multi-material, printer.
@@peterfelecan3639 You need to use the right materials for the right applications. Did you have them help you or did you just order stuff without talking to them? Also, I used them for many other spot fixes and little bits that I didn't want to lubricate/clean all the time; things I wanted to stay slippery/smooth, without maintenance, and long wear life. I simply trusted that if I needed to replace the bearings in my front loaders hydraulic arms that they didn't FAKE the extensive testing and demonstrations they've published using heavy equipment. I've sent your concerns to Igus but that's all the effort I'm going to give to a random anecdote on the internet. I'll check it though, it's easy enough. We'll see what's up with your complaint.
I have been enjoying your videos immensely. My intuitions make me think there would be some pulsation in this mechanism. One question I have is how do they smooth out any oscillations in the power transmission? Meaning, how do they smooth the variations of speed due to the circular to linear power transmission?
Two more variable speed drives you should look at, the Beier Variator and the Zero-Max Adjustable speed drive. I have used both very successfully though the Zero-Max is unforgiving when overloaded.
What about skipping the gearbox and using a spring / counterweight system on the props to maintain a specific RPM? Springs to keep the pitch course until the counterweights kick in bringing the blade finer and finer until the desired rpm is reached. Would also help prevent an overspeed situation.
@@ThinkingandTinkering I am over the moon that you replied to my comment! I think I should rephrase my question then. Was there a video of it being completely assembled?
What about a variable magnetic field on the generator or a variable length serpentine? Could that be a direction to solve the problem on wind generation stabilization without risk of overheating and less mechanics that could break?
Looking at all the sliding, geared, racked parts made me think of a book I had (twice) that is actually not only obscure but the author really didn't want to write it. Antonin Svoboda preferred his treatises to be mind crushing pure theoretical logic, which is how I learned of him. One of my managers from a previous life showed me one of the manuscripts, photocopied (maybe even drum copied or faxed lol), which instantly gave me a headache. He smiled, and said "well you asked where I was getting inspiration for my designs/patents, this is one source but it's nearly unreadable". I noted the author and looked for works that I could kind of understand when I happened upon a Dover book (not an affiliate) that was clearly written in plain, easy to understand language (even if I can't comprehend 90% of the deeper math/engineering), so I picked it up. I loaned it to a mechanical engineer that was working on a wafer loader/handling design for semiconductor fabrication and never got it back. I found another volume at a bookstore that was part of a bigger series, hard cloth bound, with pullout nomograms, much nicer than the one I had although much less convenient to carry around and study. The text's title is Computing Mechanisms and Linkages by Antonin Svoboda There are a couple copies on archive dt org and I apologize in advance for your lost hours because I can barely read the thing and I still spent months staring at it until the book got packed somewhere in a move. When I can finally understand more of it I'll get another copy because there's nothing quite like it. If I say any more I might spoil some of the surprises so I'll stop there.
Stuff that messing about. Use the idea of the first cvt motor box. Which used cones and a belt. Yes not as efficient , but easier to make and maintain , also you can use gearing on the output to increase either speed or torque
hi robert another great video i would like to ask if you could do a video at some point on how to make a dryer for a hho cell i do not know if you have already done this already but could you let me know if you have and i will go and watch it thanks
What about making the distance between magnets and spole in the wind mill generator variabel instead then it could all be mechanical self adjusting using the centrifugal force. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the unit with the 2 arms flipping out when rotating
Are you sure variable gearing makes sense in a wind turbine? More torque is required to increase speed. When the wind speed is low, the input torque will also be low. Regardless, more moving parts means more friction.
Just curious about the parts that you printed using your 3d printer: Did any parts require any CA glue or are they holding up as is after being printed?
Who is the poor guy assigned to sit by the gear shift 24 hours a day to shift it, since the wind is variable too? The nice thing about the pulley/belt version is that it has spring loaded pulleys that self adjust due to the torque. I think.
Wouldn't it be a bad thing that the more stuff you throw into it then the less you will get out due to friction, torque, etc??? I mean there is nothing 100% efficient so would it give us more than the loss the contraption added?
@@ThinkingandTinkering I didn't mean this I meant in general. If we have a 20% loss, or even a 3% loss, are we going to get more than the loss the contraption adds? That is what I was asking.
@@ThinkingandTinkering Sure, as I am sincerely interested. You know there is absolutely nothing on this planet that is 100% efficient and with that cool part you demonstrated in the vid you said it was about 80% efficient. Now that was what you made, but it applies to everything, even NASA made contraption, only the efficiency should be better. Let's use your 80 percent for this. That means there is a 20% loss. I am thinking like a VAWT and how it would use a transmission to go from vertical to horizontal. That transmission will induce a loss (in this example, that would be 20%). Wouldn't it be better to just go horizontal? I just think we are ending up with some really cool contraptions that in the end makes it less efficient and is a Rube Goldberg type mechanism. It would be akin to saving 10 mpg in a car, but it used 15 gallons more than just doing a direct drive instead. I understand the theoretical as long as chasing after it gets us to actually save more than we use with it.
@@generalawareness101 ah ok - thank you for that mate - i understand - the efficiency I quoted was for all friction transmissions of this type not the one i made - that is it is the understood figure for friction transmissions even if they were superbly machined by anyone including NASA. It's the problem with friction transmissions. The reason you use a continuously variable transmission (CVT) is it best matches the rotor speed to the generator speed for all wind conditions so the loss in efficiency in transmission is often made up by the overall machine efficiency in converting wind to electrical power - bear in mind most wind turbines as total machines are only around 30% efficient - if you use a CVT that has a higher efficiency than a cone type friction transmission the efficiency can go even higher such that the total machine efficiency is raised above the total machine efficiency of just using a gear set - this is why automobile manufacturers are crazy for this tech
If electro magnets were used on the wind turbine generator could not a variable matched drive be achieved by altering the magnetic field of the coils with electronics, monitoring speed and electrical power, similar idea to MPPT.
Could you look at toroidal gearboxes. I used to work for Torotrak as a designer and their gearbox with the compression plasticising Shell oil was something really interesting and would make a great tinker cad model!
Is that a conical drive at your right elbow? Did I miss an episode? I've had this design in my head for years and always wondered if I was breaking some rule of physics and was wondering why someone hasn't invented it yet... and there it is... as long as it's what I think it is.
yes - we call it heath robinson - but if you think this is over complicated you haven't seen many CVTs lol - I joke - of course - you should also remember this was made this way as a teaching aid for how ratchet CVTs work - a final model would be more compact and less obvious - but harder to teach from
I appreciate the versatility of 3d printing, but not being able to afford computers, let alone a 3d printer. Your videos for a while have been of little utility for me.
really? I find that odd as the videos have nothing to do with 3d printing - sure I use a 3d printer but it is just a tool to get something done - this video is about ratchet variable transmissions - i use the 3d printer to explain the logic and construction of them - you can make them anyway you want if you use the logic - i am sorry you don't find that useful
I do find it in part useful, but every video has the associated tinker cad file. Which I have no way of accessing it, so it seems like getting half the info. I find it easier to get a deeper understanding of principles when I can actually spend time looking at the renders and specifications.It's not your responsibility. Just wanted you to know how it came across to me and possibly others
