Hydroelectrics, at it's core, is a solar powered gravity battery. Solar energy evaporates the water. Then rain and snow redeposits this water at higher altitudes, from which it flows down again.
I just asked this of RMS then I saw your comment so allow me to repost it here as it fits: I have an idea I wonder if you ever thought about? I am sure it isn't new, but I think it is novel. How about hydroelectric on a microscale? By that I mean between your residence and the water meter (on your side of the water meter) you put in a hydro electro mini energy harvester (hydroelectric generator) so any time you use the tap, flush a Loo, take a shower, water the garden, etc... it harvests some electricity as well? Nothing major , of course, but it does use water as a dual-purpose function. Just think, flushing the Loo will also gen some energy besides the water just being used to fill up the tank. I am sure you could get really imaginative with it.
@@generalawareness101 So long as you can tolerate the losses in pressure and flow as the result of such energy harvesting, sure. But unless you are using relatively large amounts of water, you won't have an opportunity to harvest much.
Thought along the same line: evaporator tank heated with solar to reservoir above with a greedy cup mechanism above a hydro electric turbine releasing water back down to the solar boiler below. Just a thought.
Super happy to see this. This feels like the key I needed to put it all together in my head. I always forget about clockwork escapements, and how freaking cool they are for regulation.
I agree. I was trying to run through my head how you limit the fall when you don't need the energy out that fast, and I too forget about these mechanisms.
You wouldn't believe me if I told you I was dreaming about this last night having gone to bed worrying about the drought problem in Morocco and the paper windmill from yesterday. But I did. Huge numbers of countries around the world is starving because of drought. These could power desalination plants as well as provide the energy to pump the fresh water to where it's needed. Man made lakes could be filled up, maybe even at height to provide energy when released too. Cheap and as efficient as they need to be. Thank you for this video
@@ThinkingandTinkering it began with your paper windmill on top of a street lamp (which are turned off almost everywhere here) You are inspirational Robert. How do we get these ideas of yours into production?
I was and still like the gravity battery. I have proposed 20 years ago now, building houses from concrete in which the entire house is lifted to store its solar power. This is particularly useful in coastal areas, where the heavy weight of the house keeps them from getting destroyed in high winds. I also found a company that designs "log cabins" using concrete logs, so one can build a very heavy house using easily transported logs that are assembled at the build site. As you know, the energy density is very very low, in fact, gravity is the weakest form of energy we know of, so to store a normal days energy consumption collected by solar panels, you need a very very heavy house, and have to raise it like 20ft. Hydraulics seems the only solution for this, but as any tractor person knows, the seals wear out, and any mechanical system also has issues with wear and safety. It makes batteries look dead simple in comparison.
fascinating concept Robert!, there could be a way to harness a water supply (rainwater) to utilise the enormous power of buoyancy, by filling a pipe containing a float to lift the drop weight back back to its max height to reset the cycle over again (this would involve a bit of thought - and a valve).
I've been thinking about a gravity battery for quite a few yrs now, and I've always figured the gearbox/gear ratio would be all that is needed to control the fall of the weight. Too little gearing, it would fall too fast, too much and it won't fall at all. It would have to be tuned to the weight and the desired rate of fall. Of course, the problem w/ a gravity battery is you either need a really tall (or deep) tower or a very heavy weight to get any real amount of storage.
@@iami9307 Awesome! I've long been into alternate energy storage, whether it be lifting a weight, pumping water, flywheels, etc. Have never made a working prototype though. Several years ago, I saw a video (maybe it's still here) where he made one out of legos and it could light an LED.
@@Dave_D. well, you’re on the right track. there was many varieties of these back in the 60s. they used mini poles from 12 to 25 feet spaced out more than 100 feet. rails on top with Pulleys and a pully on each weight. The rope went from the drive mechanism, over and around, each pulley all the way down the line. when wound up the weight would fall one by one, starting at the one closest to the drive mechanism. The drive mechanism was a DC motor or generator and some pulleys or multiple. that’s how my set up is except for only one pole, that the drive mechanism is connected to. have at it and have fun.
Hybrid system using solar to pump water out of the ground and into tanks in the attics of homes. Then when electricity is needed, open a valve to let water flow down powering a generator. No need for complicated mechanisms. Just a simple circuit which automatically opens and closes the valve. Plus this system solves two problems at once: 1) clean drinking water 2) clean, cheap, renewable power storage. And note, this hybrid system also has the advantage of distributing power generation, water production, and power storage making a community more resilient to hurricanes, tornados, and other natural disasters.
I think that at larger scales, the jerk that you mentioned in the escapement will really wear down the mechanism, even with a flywheel. Escapements bring the wheel to a hard stop with each tick. I could see this really shining with regenerative braking to control the weight! You need a generator attached at some point anyway, you might as well offload as much control of the weight to the generator as possible.
You might check out Thomas Jefferson's cannon ball clock at his Monticello home. Although an unusual kind of clock, it would also serve as a kind of gravity battery, too. If memory serves, he also used something similar to effect the automatic opening and closing of some of the doors in his home. A pressure plate in the floor was the trigger for the mechanism. Not his ideas originally, but he did make unique use of the ideas.
You can have lighting, entertainment (tv/laptop), and boil the kettle as many times as you need in a day for an energy budget of 2kWh or less. The problem, especially in the UK, is heating and hot water for washing/cleaning. The other problem is the 'powers that be' want everything centralised so you have to pay for energy. A 'falling rock' battery would probably be great for keeping the lights on overnight but doesn't store a lot unless you have a really large rock or a really long fall for it. Energy (Joules) for 'falling rock' is mass (Kg) x acceleration due to gravity (9.81) x fall distance. For comparison there are 3,600,000 Joules in 1 kWh (1000Kg rock needs to fall 367m over 1 hour)
Saw this quote & thought of yoy Rob! "Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." - Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 - 1986) Hungarian Biochemist 1937 Nobel Prize for Physiology
One problem with any clock escapement is that it wastes a lot of the energy. Pendulums in clocks take only minuscule amounts of energy to keep them going. They are heavy objects moving relatively slowly through only air. So clock escapements need to be optimized to feed only tiny amounts of energy into the pendulum; or in fact they are optimized to only feed energy into the pendulum when it has an energy deficit. The remaining energy is wasted by bringing the geared wheel to a dead stop. I'm not saying that you couldn't control energy release from a weight via an escapement, but it would require a complete rethinking compared to a clock escapement.
There are of course other methods of controlling the fall such as centrifugal governors as used with steam engines or magnetic attenuation as used in fairground rides, but they all have one major disadvantage... By stopping (or slowing down) the weight they are attenuating the potential energy available as opposed to a weight in 'free fall' which increases in speed (momentum) as it falls due the constant accelation effect of gravity. Some method would have to be devised to recoup this lost energy caused by the 'upward acceleration' of the weight during it's 'breaking period'.
Interleaving those mechanisms to nudge a flywheel might work to reduce the ripple. Or a flywheel who's rotation speed is kept constant by means of a synchronous generator to keep the load constant might also work. Something to try.
I have to echo you - that's awesome. My steampunk sensibility is tickled and I'm looking at that 10 meter drop near my house with fresh eyes. A ram pump in the river below could provide the weight. When the tank gets to the bottom it activates a valve to drain the water back into the river and the lighter tank can be pulled up with little energy input to be refilled. -Rinse- drain, repeat.
I would love to see you build something that puts this all together. I'm thinking the vertical wind turbine with the velocity stack powering a gravity battery would be really cool.
Graphene fortified gravity batteries are gonna be out of this world. Especially if you have a magnet pulling downwards in synergy with gravity. I wanna do experiments with Robert 😭
Gotta love RUclips: subscribe and never see a video popup in the list, but search for something like gravity batteries and suddenly there's more than a few about them.
Tall and sturdy trees as the weight towers. No need to climb. Watch some arborist videos on how to "throw", or shoot a small line over a sturdy branch, then replace with a bigger rope. That can be used to haul up a pulley that is pre-loaded with another rope... Or in this case your decent mechanism. That mechanism may actually be housed on the ground and a re-direct makes the rope go up instead of down. The weight still needs to be hauled up though... The flywheel (to smooth out the ticking) and generator the whole contraption powwers can be on the ground.
Actually, the energy density of gravity storage is directly proportional to the height of your tower. If anchored helium Balloon stations were used, the height of your "tower" could be many miles high.
Robert, I'm so glad you're taking this route. it makes so much sense for static energy storage. using a clock mechanism is pure genius (can I feel a Back to the Future 3 moment here?). can't wait to see a full working gravity battery set up, it has to be the holy grail of power storage.
No, it's not. The clock mechanism seems inefficient for generating power. It's fine if you have to generate a fixed, unvarying amount of power and only that amount of power, but that's not how electricity grids work. Why not just do what windmills do and use the generator load to regulate the speed and output?
A River Generator, Take 2 bicycle wheel and a long length or rope, 40 foot would be ideal, Connect the 2 ends of the rope together so you have a complete circle, Take one wheel and place it in the ground in the river where the current is strong, Then take the other wheel and place that 20 foot further down the river, Make some scoops and place them every 2 ft apart and connect them to the rope, Place the rope around both wheel and watch the current drag the scoops down the river and out of the water and back to the first wheel repeating the process, Most rivers run all the time. Connect a coil to the wheel and bobs your uncle.
This one right here hits the nail on the head and in looking to smoothen the rotational to linear conversion, I've though of using the Scotch Yoke attached to the pendulum instead of an escarpment mechanism. Can't wait to see your next video!
@@ThinkingandTinkering Not quite sure my original message was as clear as it could have been... but I'll try to elaborate a bit more. The pendulum should be hanging from a movable pivot to control the frequency and the linear output of the Scotch Yoke should be stationary at the top end of the fulcrum as an input. I hope my words make sense lol Cheers!
As a clock maker might I suggest that you use an addaption of the strike mechanism as it will give a constant smooth power speed of which is controlled by gears and a fan
Simple to do is add a coiled spring between the "clock" output shaft and whatever shaft you want to drive...just needs to avoid resonance between clock and load...
You will find that Martin from 'Wintergaten' channel made some really nice improvements on the escapement mechanism concepts, based on comments from his channel participants that he applied to the MMX, particularly on the escapement arm angles so that there is less friction on the escapement wheel and less gear backpush or backlash as it goes through a cycle.
Ha! Was literally thinking about Martin when Rob brought out the escapement idea... yeah I second this - they've gone through a lot of iterations to arrive at some pretty awesome conclusions and optimisations for the escapement mechanism. Rob's and Wintergatan's channels are the only channels I've subscribed to and watch almost religiously on youtube 😁👍 Will we see a marble machine electrical energy generator in the near future??
And you could use a wind turbine to "charge" this energy battery. Wind it up during windy times and discharge during still times. The weight could also be used to add pressure to an accumulator.
Something i was thinking about today is a watch mainspring. It can be wound at the same time energy is extracted from it. A gravity battery could be "charged" as it falls leading to 0 downtime
What I find is amazing is you can do the same thing with high pressure tanks and compressed air units work amazingly … there’s a gentleman who produced an air motor for cars that have two 16” inch diameter air tanks 6 ft long that give the car something like 250 miles per fill up …. Use that air motor to turn a genset or permanent magnet motor to produce power, use solar to run a compressor to fill the tanks and you can have a small room 8x8 filled with the high pressure tanks which will give you enough air to run a few houses off grid 24 hrs a day
I would suggest just one tooth, so once released it travels a full revolution down giving the weight enough distance to generate more usable downward velocity.
So add a flywheel with a one way clutch to even out the jerkiness and the pendulum controls imparting the weights energy into the flywheel. The flywheel connects to a generator, and presto, youve got power. Very cool!
Makes me think of all the dis-used coalmine lift shafts, some are miles deep. Use water for ballast and release it at the bottom, less energy required to bring it back up.
There's that gravity powered mechanism which spins a falling flywheel around vertical axis, usually sold as a kinetic sculpture/toy. It has 2 bits of string attached that unwind as it falls, then wind/draw it part of the way back up again. Maybe easier/cheaper to make, and using something like UHMWPE rope it could hold a very heavy weight.
Gravity batteries don't self-discharge, but they aren't 100% efficient. The electric motor which hoists it is going to be something like 85% efficient, and the dynamo lowering it will be similar.
I love water gravity, like cliff railway as the downside is you have to lift the weight back up. All we need is a source of water. Plenty of coastal area where water streams flow out to sea.
I see one big flaw with a Gravity Power Generator. If the current required is low the “rock” will fall very quickly. If the current required is extreme, the “rock” will fall slowly. If the current is very, very high the “rock” will stop! After all, it is a breaking mechanism like that found in hybrid and electric cars.
You could put magnets straight on the escapement wheel. Yes the power output would be spiky, but that's simpler and probably more efficient to handle electrically with a capacitor and a couple of diodes than by complicating the mechanism. You don't even need a full rectifier because the motion's only going one way.
1. You can use a old saw blade :) 2. This is not only a battery. It is a engine too. Example: i will try to use it to let a solar panel follow the sun :) 3. A important thing is the efficiency of using energie. Example: a normal electric car vs. a Peraves Ecomobile
Nice build and demonstration! You can't get any more reliable storage system than a gravity based one. I don't ever recall hearing about any time when Earth's gravity failed to work. LOL!
There are multiple problems with gravity batteries lifting weights. The main one, and the one that makes the concept of lifting rocks non viable economically, Is that pumped storage exists. For those that point out that pumped storage requires suitable terrain for the dam, I remind you that water towers exist. And they can be built to match any scale that a "gravity battery" could be built to. If gravity batteries had any advantage over pumped storage, then we would be seeing them everywhere. The idea and technology isn't new. It one of the oldest means of storing energy humanity has. Just look at how grandfather clocks are powered.
thanks for this awesome work. be useful for so many little gadgets could be powered by weights or springs. be great for auto pellet feeders and the like
The problem seems to be that it requires energy to get the weight up to the top each time you drop it. Imagine a weight on board a boat or floating vessel of some kind. The boat is inside a giant tube. As you add water to the tube, the boat, with the weight, floats up. When it gets to the top, you turn on a tap and release the water. The boat, with the weight, gently falls to the bottom of the tube without any jerky movements. The speed of fall is determined by the rate at which the water leaves the tube. How do you add water to the tube without spending money to pump it there? Use a ram pump or a number of ram pumps to lift it to the top of the tube. A ram pump can lift water several hundred feet. It's a slow, low capacity way to do it, but it costs nothing in terms of fuel. When the water is released, it can go to irrigation, straight back into the river, or be used in some other way. This could be used on elevated land above a river valley. This is just an idea. I don't know how practical it would be. The locks in canals made me think about this.
that's not a problem mate - that's just life - your suggestion is also using energy to get the weight to the top - it's an interesting way but not energy free
@RobertMurraySmith I know it uses the energy from the flow of water in the river, but that energy costs nothing. The cost of the infrastructure has to be taken into account, of course.
@@justtinkering6713 I know. The point I was trying to make, unsuccessfully, it seems, is that all energy storage devices need to be "charged" in some way. It takes a lot of energy to lift a large weight to "charge" a gravity battery. I was just considering a way of doing that cheaply. It just struck me that the weight pulling down as the water level drops would provide some power, but the water could also drive a generator as it was drained.
Image rigging such a system over a swimming pool! Presto! You have instant huge weight and that you can capture in a scoop or large bucket, and raise it up using solar panels etc. Potential for thousands of pounds of weight, and usable by any homeowner with a pool in back yard.
I emailed elegoo about availability of their neptune 3 but they say they are discontinued in the UK. Not sure why. I bought a neptune 2s instead. Very impressed
No one ever thinks that you can use gas pressure as a battery. I think you can use light to generate pressure using a small electrolyzer of dissimilar metals in Clorox bleach. The gasses made will make tremendous pressure to run a steam or air engine. Though if you have one way valves and let the pressure move back to the expansion chamber it would be ideal or how ever that would work. The only problem is the oxygen and hydrogen may explode under enough pressure unless it is some sort of ion expansion. Though the obvious choice is compressed air or liquid nitrogen. Though the Diepetro engine never went commercial for what ever reason.
Id like something like: External fitted casing going in a column up a portion of my house, something i can paint or grow ivy up, with a gravity battery rig inside. If it could deliver a couple of hundred watts over say a half hour period this would be a really good way to "sip" from your solar rig on changeable days. Paired with a standard chemical battery, solar and water diverter youd further smooth out the peaks and troughs and extend the actual battery into the darker hours. It could be quite sizable. Half a ton of concrete is not that much volume. The question what could that produce over around 5-6m. Not sure of the equation, presume its a fairly basic one i just need it identify the right one to know if my idea is worthless lol
Oof did the maths. 6-7 tons over half an hour if you want it delivering 200w over 5m. I guess forget that idea for residential lol Or my maths is wrong. Not my strong suit.
Maybe the jerky movement could power an air pump to make a buoyancy device that rises up a column of water then lets the air out at the top and sinks back down ?.
Hi mate hope all is well. I think a gravity battery is a great idea and I think they are much much more convenient and would be enough for some led lights and a bit more at night. I think solar can wind it up/supply electric in the day and this at night. I shall have a little go myself and see how I get on but keep up the good work. Thank you xxx
Use an old floating oil drilling plattform (or make a new one), maneuver it above the mariana trench and let it lift and drop a 1000 t weight down there. Thats around 30000 kWh stored energy. Recharge by solar and wind.
I had been thinking of something similar but instead of a fly wheel I was looking at generation at the pendulum and using diodes and a capacitor to smooth the signal out. It would minimize mechanical loss and just be simpler all around.
A 1000kg object raised 367m represents 1kwh of energy. This is slightly less than an average lead acid car battery capacity. Enthusiasm is great, but with a little rationality and understanding of quantities of energy and the scale of engineering required to store mechanical potential energy, one can then understand why gravity batteries are of very limited use case.
A cubic metre of water falling a single metre is the equivalent of 1kW of energy. A litre of water weighs one kg. A cubic metre of water therefore weighs 1,000 kg. Redo your sums.
Another thing would be a magnet at the end of the pendulum and a coil for it to pass by to generate some small electricity. (Or an arc of coils to generate more) That would use the pull of the magnet against the coil to slow the pendulum as well.
A very great video with pictures that have finally given me the idea on how to go about building a gravity battery. From my onboard HHO generation experiments I remember that a car alternator becomes heavier and heavier to turn if you set up the electrolyzer to pull more amps and make more gas, and how I found 5 amps to be the optimal draw to notice improvement in fuel economy with it. So with that in mind a few more ideas have come to mind, in order to control the falling speed of a suspended weight. Of course the force making the alternator's pulley more resistant to rotation is magnetism. So something along that line for one thing. It will require iterations with different weights and the charging power my home system needs. I particularly like the water bottle suspended from the roof picture. So 30 amps @ 52 volts for, say, four hours, after the sun goes down. Something to start the design. :) Thank you kindly sir. Especially now I am, and the world is, under the boot heel of the way economics work and inflation as you may know. Another idea I can think of is using a "speed governor" system which is electronically and automatically controlled. I am a civil engineer but I self taught my self electrical and electronics over the course of a few years to build stuff like this. :D
Hi Robert, Sorry to be the pourer of cold-water, but the premise upon which you decided you needed some sort of speed regulator, to stop the weight simply falling down, is totally incorrect. The rate at which the weight drops is governed by the amount of power the generator is producing. P = m.g.v, which rearranges to v = P/ (m.g). Example: We are dropping a 100kg weight and our power output is 1000W. Taking g = 9.81 m/s² then our weight will have to be dropping at v = 1000/(100x9.81) = 1.02m/s. To be efficient, the gearing will have to be arranged so that, at the generator’s rated RPM, the weight will be dropping at that speed. Alter the weight, speed or power and at least one of the other two will have to be altered to match. In other words your escapement wheel and pendulum are both unnecessary and a hindrance, rather than a help. You do NOT want stop/go motion if you’re using a generator. They’re designed for maximum efficiency, at a particular, constant rpm. Have you thought of enrolling, on line, for classes in Physics? I feel you would make much better progress if you understood some more of the basics. Please keep on your tinkering. It may not seem like it from my comments, but I’m a fan.😊
You should make a video response to this video. You know, demonstrate some of the basic physics that you think he doesn't understand. Did you even watch the entire 8 minute 40 second video? Your comment makes it seem very much like you did not. Or that you did not understand most of what was being discussed if you did. Enjoy your day mate. They all end.
Other thing is chemical battery wear out and loses capacity. Weight battery with well lubricated system and good component quality doesn't lose that much. If it lose some efficienxy, just replace mechanical part that failed! I think it's probably possible to even create weight battery powered vehicle.
Gravity batteries are a great idea until you consider the logistics of, say, wind forces, wear and tear on the mechanisms that have to shuffle the blocks around, wear and tear on the blocks themselves, the infrastructure itself, etc. You mention that you're "being glib to make a point" which I appreciate, but I do wish we'd focus more on pumped hydro! If we could fill old mines (like at 2:18) either directly or with storage tanks we could make use of a closed loop pumped hydro. Maybe even using toxic waste water from the mines themselves to better quarantine it. That said, with regards to control, a hybrid flywheel, gear reduction, gravity battery could be pretty efficient too. Use gravity to spin up the flywheel and then use the flywheel to run the generator. That might reduce the amount of shuffling you'd need to do as well
Let's go further and use a sand battery as the payload. If we put everything in a dwell, the water column would provide a good gradient of temperature in conjuction with the stirling engine to convert the heat back into electricity. Where is my shovel...
You could put the "pendulum power generator" setup you did on here to generate more power as well. I think the pendulum aspect would produce more power than spinning a generator, but it would have to be tested to be certain.
Can’t wait to see it charged by a turbine or a mechanical rectifier! I’m festinated by pendulum clocks and even thought quite a bit about trying to build an escapement mechanism to drive a player piano.
Any sort of friction brake (using air resistance or friction material) is effectively wasting the eneregy that has been stored so you would want to avoid is in anything except a dire emergency. But I agree that any gravity battery is likely to need some sort of emergency brake. Realistically any commercial gravity battery is going to have to employ the same sort of independent brake that lift cars use, in case the winding gear or cable fails.
Interesting. I've been thinking and researching along the exact same line. I've heard clock gearing is highly efficient, and the length of the pendulum changes the speed according to pendulum theory. Since the movement is in the pendulum , thinking out loud here, perhaps put a series of magnets stators on the pendulum itself? Or perhaps align two different pendulums to steady out the flow like a two phase pendulum? Great fun ty!
I'm just a girl on the Internet and not an engineer, but this is fascinating to me. If we can regenerate energy from braking systems on cars, can we recapture energy from elevators in tall buildings?
Frankly yes, that could be possible. But for that we would need to change a bit how Elevators work. Atm Elevators all have a counterweight, one goes up as the other goes down. The cable between the two moves over a big drum, which in turn is connected to the motor up in the mechanics. And that motor just moves the difference between the empty cabin and a full one. So not much energy is needed to move the Cabin tbh, or rather in this context, no energy is stored. If we want to use elevators to store energy, your would have to remove the counterweight and use the weight of the passengers to generate electricity instead of using it to lower the cabin.
@@Luziferne I do know how elevators work. Lots of open lifts here in Mexico, and they fascinate me. However, regenerative braking is a completely different aspect, and it's okay if a girl whose husband was a Porsche engineer for a racing team knows a thing or two about regenerative braking and has an aha! moment watching a video about gravity batteries.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong: Isn't 100% of the energy of the falling weight being used in order to push the pendulum? Does not the pendulum need to be balanced with how much energy the falling weight can provide in order for this mechanism to work? If you were to try to capture any of the energy of the system it would slow the pendulum and cause the device to stop working.
You’re 100% correct. Unfortunately this entire mechanism is a complete waste of energy as it is being used to maintain the motion of the pendulum. Proper gearing to a DC motor allows the rotation at the correct RPM and torque to generate the maximum electricity as per the efficiency of the generator. I’ve never seen him lead us astray like this he must really be sick. But it is a fun mechanism
the penulum timing is set by its length. Only a tiny bit of energy is needed to catch and release the latch from the pendulum arc momemtum. If the arc is not limited to this small amount then the pendulums swing will increase cummulatively, but not its period. The excess energy is from the weight drop hammering the catch. Instead the drop can pulse spin a flywheel by regular amounts
A couple of thoughts: - I always cringe when you use the Energy Vault image. I was initially enchanted by it, but it has some real problems with energy density, crane sway, and especially fault tolerance (dealing with high winds, earthquakes, vandalism, software errors, etc.) However, I have hope for Gravitricity, a UK company investigating the feasibility of repurposing exhausted mines as gravity battery installations. They seem like realistic engineers doing practical work. - I know pendulums can be very high-efficiency, but I'd be curious to know how much of the stored energy is lost pushing the pendulum. - Thank you for your practical, hobby-/home-scale gravity battery videos! I love the non-volatility and elegance of gravity batteries, even though their energy density is very poor. I dream of a future with a variety of generation and energy storage mechanisms that are used appropriate to whatever is needed.
The key to efficient storage is decent height (or depth), otherwise the energy density is just too low for the capital cost. It occurred to me while watching this video that bulk ore carriers can carry up to 300,000 tonnes (VLOC's) or more of iron ore. Sit them just off a continental shelf at 4000m to the ocean floor , and that ore has some 9000 GJ of energy (100 MW of generating capacity for 24 hours) if it were dropped to the sea floor on a winch connected to a generator that is $124,000 worth of electricity at 0.05c/kWhr. So perhaps a ship heading to the scrapyard could be repurposed as a gravity battery and made economically viable, especially if you could integrate wave/wind power.
@@ThinkingandTinkering In Australia they have a long railway for iron ore that falls all the way to the port. But this only really generated enough to get the empties back up again.
@@ThinkingandTinkering Ok with extreme weights you need extreme tensile strength in rope and structure. I even looked at storing energy in several tens of kilometers of rope tension at some point. The capital cost at low energy density just kills small scale 😭
Hi just a little bit out of the box, could you not take a lot of old spent heavy chemical batteries, then use them as a man made stone, no need to dump them.👍🐝🌞
They tend to be rather light for their volume, intentionally so (The heavy lead ones currently get recycled.) Also using batteries as weights brings with it all the toxicity problems that gravity batteries are trying to solve .
I love the subtle energy mechanics of BioGeometry. Using subtle energy to magnify and direct qualities instead of quantities is the future IMO. Dr Ibrahim Karim and Dr Robert Gilbert also know about this. Great shows I love watching these videos and you make so many of them bravo 👏 🙌 keep it up! Thank you!
I would love to see more videos based on vortex mechanics like Viktor Schauburger stuff. Also the hydrophobic EZ water filter concepts are bizarre I'd love to see some stuff that you would do with that data! Thanks again cheers!!
What about a large column of concrete inside a tube with a generator/motor for lowering and raising but before it goes up it goes into a semi vacuum to reduce the load to raise the weight.
This eliminates any momentum the weights might build which is theoretical mass and therefore extra energy ripe for the taking If you drop the weight 10 meters and let it fall fast you'll get more energy from stopping it than you would if you dropped them 10 meters in 1 meter increments I feel like it'd be better with some sort of variable gear system. Let it build momentum on the way down then shift the gear ratio as it gets lower
Brilliant! I too have invented the heavy house on stilts that lifts overnight using low rate hydro with geared worm drive, reversing direction to return potential energy to geared down output (ever tried turning a clock movement backwards from power train outwards, to click the escapement?)
I invented the 'heavy' car park, where the car park is raised on hydraulic rams at night (when there is cheap electricity), and where the cars that park in it can be recharged during the day by allowing the carpark to fall down to it's lower level. (The electric cars would use the same amount of energy to climb into the car park as their own weight would return in power generated as the car park falls, but the weight of the carpark itself would provide the power to recharge the cars).
@@tlangdon12 Lol!! Makes sense, you would 'steal' the car owner's electricity and sell it back to them by making the carparks taller than they should be and lower them in time for when they want it...! Cheaper night electricity is increasing becoming a myth because of EVs btw. If I knew where to start I would have thought using EVs for bi-directional grid storage would have been a good idea, but I'm not sure.
Great! That's a funny coincidence. I'm trying exactly the same thing right now. I chose the classic Graham escapement as used in many grandfathers' clocks. I've uploaded a short video snippet to my RUclips "channel". I really like your clean design and the closed shape. My next step is to connect it to a stepper motor, or maybe a modification of your mechanical rectifier first. 🙂
I've thought about utilizing a 10speed rear bicycle wheel as a means to use a weight to turn the chain through a set of gears to spin a generator of some sort.....always thought it would be a fun project......but other fun projects seem to get in the way of this one. seems it would be an easy thing to reset and the bike wheel will ratchet to reset the weight...perhaps I will try to move this project to a higher priority in the tinker list.
The most you can power is charging your phone for a brief period with that. Many have done that. Look it up on RUclips. Search words Bike alternator generator charge
Given that there is an inevitable energy loss for every step of conversion, would it be more efficient or better to harvest and store energy in the same form they are collected in and only convert it if the needed form of energy is depleted? e.g. collecting and storing heat to use primarily for heating purposes (I don't know how that would work for getting 200 plus Celsius for cooking); storing compressed air for pressurizing a well or your waterlines; I would even go as far as to say filtering and storing low pressure oxygen for regulating in-home O2 levels.
A magnet attached to the pendulum swinging by a coil would probably generate enough electricity to make an LED flash. Yet another way to power a system do deter rodents in dark buildings and the like. (At least the rodents around here hate flashing lights.)
Just an idea regarding the mass and lifting mechanism. 🤔 If the mass is lifted by a rope using multiple pulleys then the height becomes reasonable and provides more power in less space 😉
Hydroelectrics, at it's core, is a solar powered gravity battery. Solar energy evaporates the water. Then rain and snow redeposits this water at higher altitudes, from which it flows down again.
yeah and pumped hydro is also a kind of gravity battery
@notmyrealname
I suppose that actual density could be construed in that way.
I just asked this of RMS then I saw your comment so allow me to repost it here as it fits: I have an idea I wonder if you ever thought about? I am sure it isn't new, but I think it is novel. How about hydroelectric on a microscale? By that I mean between your residence and the water meter (on your side of the water meter) you put in a hydro electro mini energy harvester (hydroelectric generator) so any time you use the tap, flush a Loo, take a shower, water the garden, etc... it harvests some electricity as well? Nothing major , of course, but it does use water as a dual-purpose function. Just think, flushing the Loo will also gen some energy besides the water just being used to fill up the tank. I am sure you could get really imaginative with it.
@@generalawareness101
So long as you can tolerate the losses in pressure and flow as the result of such energy harvesting, sure. But unless you are using relatively large amounts of water, you won't have an opportunity to harvest much.
Thought along the same line: evaporator tank heated with solar to reservoir above with a greedy cup mechanism above a hydro electric turbine releasing water back down to the solar boiler below. Just a thought.
Got to love the ticking sounds of a time piece, indicates the pace of life and very soothing
it is an awesome sound mate
Super happy to see this. This feels like the key I needed to put it all together in my head. I always forget about clockwork escapements, and how freaking cool they are for regulation.
I agree. I was trying to run through my head how you limit the fall when you don't need the energy out that fast, and I too forget about these mechanisms.
they are cool
You wouldn't believe me if I told you I was dreaming about this last night having gone to bed worrying about the drought problem in Morocco and the paper windmill from yesterday. But I did. Huge numbers of countries around the world is starving because of drought. These could power desalination plants as well as provide the energy to pump the fresh water to where it's needed. Man made lakes could be filled up, maybe even at height to provide energy when released too. Cheap and as efficient as they need to be. Thank you for this video
i do believe you and i like your thinking
@@ThinkingandTinkering it began with your paper windmill on top of a street lamp (which are turned off almost everywhere here) You are inspirational Robert. How do we get these ideas of yours into production?
Start a company, launch a Kickstarter.
Happy to hear you mention Philippines ❤
I was and still like the gravity battery. I have proposed 20 years ago now, building houses from concrete in which the entire house is lifted to store its solar power.
This is particularly useful in coastal areas, where the heavy weight of the house keeps them from getting destroyed in high winds.
I also found a company that designs "log cabins" using concrete logs, so one can build a very heavy house using easily transported logs that are assembled at the build site. As you know, the energy density is very very low, in fact, gravity is the weakest form of energy we know of,
so to store a normal days energy consumption collected by solar panels, you need a very very heavy house, and have to raise it like 20ft.
Hydraulics seems the only solution for this, but as any tractor person knows, the seals wear out, and any mechanical system also has issues with wear and safety. It makes batteries look dead simple in comparison.
that is clever mate - thanks for sharing
fascinating concept Robert!, there could be a way to harness a water supply (rainwater) to utilise the enormous power of buoyancy, by filling a pipe containing a float to lift the drop weight back back to its max height to reset the cycle over again (this would involve a bit of thought - and a valve).
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and work with everyone.
Great video, Rob! Hope you're feeling better :) You sound better 🎉
cheers mate - i am feeling better
I've been thinking about a gravity battery for quite a few yrs now, and I've always figured the gearbox/gear ratio would be all that is needed to control the fall of the weight. Too little gearing, it would fall too fast, too much and it won't fall at all. It would have to be tuned to the weight and the desired rate of fall. Of course, the problem w/ a gravity battery is you either need a really tall (or deep) tower or a very heavy weight to get any real amount of storage.
gearing would be good mate
That’s what I am working on now. in a room in the house. currently only using six of the 12 30 pound weights.
@@iami9307 Awesome! I've long been into alternate energy storage, whether it be lifting a weight, pumping water, flywheels, etc. Have never made a working prototype though.
Several years ago, I saw a video (maybe it's still here) where he made one out of legos and it could light an LED.
@@Dave_D. well, you’re on the right track. there was many varieties of these back in the 60s. they used mini poles from 12 to 25 feet spaced out more than 100 feet. rails on top with Pulleys and a pully on each weight. The rope went from the drive mechanism, over and around, each pulley all the way down the line. when wound up the weight would fall one by one, starting at the one closest to the drive mechanism. The drive mechanism was a DC motor or generator and some pulleys or multiple. that’s how my set up is except for only one pole, that the drive mechanism is connected to. have at it and have fun.
@@iami9307 I'd like to know more about what you're working on....sounds interesting.
Hybrid system using solar to pump water out of the ground and into tanks in the attics of homes. Then when electricity is needed, open a valve to let water flow down powering a generator. No need for complicated mechanisms. Just a simple circuit which automatically opens and closes the valve. Plus this system solves two problems at once: 1) clean drinking water 2) clean, cheap, renewable power storage. And note, this hybrid system also has the advantage of distributing power generation, water production, and power storage making a community more resilient to hurricanes, tornados, and other natural disasters.
I think that at larger scales, the jerk that you mentioned in the escapement will really wear down the mechanism, even with a flywheel. Escapements bring the wheel to a hard stop with each tick. I could see this really shining with regenerative braking to control the weight! You need a generator attached at some point anyway, you might as well offload as much control of the weight to the generator as possible.
have you seen the weights in large clocks? I am not sure it is much of a problem to be honest - but that is just an idea i have
You might check out Thomas Jefferson's cannon ball clock at his Monticello home. Although an unusual kind of clock, it would also serve as a kind of gravity battery, too. If memory serves, he also used something similar to effect the automatic opening and closing of some of the doors in his home. A pressure plate in the floor was the trigger for the mechanism. Not his ideas originally, but he did make unique use of the ideas.
You can have lighting, entertainment (tv/laptop), and boil the kettle as many times as you need in a day for an energy budget of 2kWh or less. The problem, especially in the UK, is heating and hot water for washing/cleaning. The other problem is the 'powers that be' want everything centralised so you have to pay for energy. A 'falling rock' battery would probably be great for keeping the lights on overnight but doesn't store a lot unless you have a really large rock or a really long fall for it. Energy (Joules) for 'falling rock' is mass (Kg) x acceleration due to gravity (9.81) x fall distance. For comparison there are 3,600,000 Joules in 1 kWh (1000Kg rock needs to fall 367m over 1 hour)
the problem is heating but there are loads of ways to do that - we just don't
Saw this quote & thought of yoy Rob!
"Discovery consists in seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
- Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 - 1986)
Hungarian Biochemist 1937 Nobel Prize for Physiology
that is an awesome quote mate - cheers
One problem with any clock escapement is that it wastes a lot of the energy. Pendulums in clocks take only minuscule amounts of energy to keep them going. They are heavy objects moving relatively slowly through only air. So clock escapements need to be optimized to feed only tiny amounts of energy into the pendulum; or in fact they are optimized to only feed energy into the pendulum when it has an energy deficit. The remaining energy is wasted by bringing the geared wheel to a dead stop.
I'm not saying that you couldn't control energy release from a weight via an escapement, but it would require a complete rethinking compared to a clock escapement.
There are of course other methods of controlling the fall such as centrifugal governors as used with steam engines or magnetic attenuation as used in fairground rides, but they all have one major disadvantage... By stopping (or slowing down) the weight they are attenuating the potential energy available as opposed to a weight in 'free fall' which increases in speed (momentum) as it falls due the constant accelation effect of gravity. Some method would have to be devised to recoup this lost energy caused by the 'upward acceleration' of the weight during it's 'breaking period'.
Interleaving those mechanisms to nudge a flywheel might work to reduce the ripple. Or a flywheel who's rotation speed is kept constant by means of a synchronous generator to keep the load constant might also work. Something to try.
Sounds like your feeling better. Another excellent video. The search will continue for one I don’t like. Keep them coming.
I am mate and cheers lol
I have to echo you - that's awesome. My steampunk sensibility is tickled and I'm looking at that 10 meter drop near my house with fresh eyes. A ram pump in the river below could provide the weight. When the tank gets to the bottom it activates a valve to drain the water back into the river and the lighter tank can be pulled up with little energy input to be refilled. -Rinse- drain, repeat.
Just use several mini hydro generators instead and not worry about the water chamber.
I would love to see you build something that puts this all together.
I'm thinking the vertical wind turbine with the velocity stack powering a gravity battery would be really cool.
Brilliant delivery!
" it's a rock" 🤣
lolol
Graphene fortified gravity batteries are gonna be out of this world. Especially if you have a magnet pulling downwards in synergy with gravity. I wanna do experiments with Robert 😭
Gotta love RUclips: subscribe and never see a video popup in the list, but search for something like gravity batteries and suddenly there's more than a few about them.
The wind turbine stuff always pops up. Gravity must be negatively biased.
you could also wind a spring to store energy on the upward movements, another useful and overlooked clock mechanism in my view
Wars are funded to kill poverty by murdering poor people.
That could overcome the variable torque issues of windpumps, since the pendulum movement is already reciprocal.
Tall and sturdy trees as the weight towers.
No need to climb. Watch some arborist videos on how to "throw", or shoot a small line over a sturdy branch, then replace with a bigger rope. That can be used to haul up a pulley that is pre-loaded with another rope... Or in this case your decent mechanism.
That mechanism may actually be housed on the ground and a re-direct makes the rope go up instead of down. The weight still needs to be hauled up though...
The flywheel (to smooth out the ticking) and generator the whole contraption powwers can be on the ground.
Actually, the energy density of gravity storage is directly proportional to the height of your tower.
If anchored helium Balloon stations were used, the height of your "tower" could be many miles high.
Robert, I'm so glad you're taking this route. it makes so much sense for static energy storage. using a clock mechanism is pure genius (can I feel a Back to the Future 3 moment here?). can't wait to see a full working gravity battery set up, it has to be the holy grail of power storage.
i would think so mate
No, it's not. The clock mechanism seems inefficient for generating power. It's fine if you have to generate a fixed, unvarying amount of power and only that amount of power, but that's not how electricity grids work. Why not just do what windmills do and use the generator load to regulate the speed and output?
A River Generator, Take 2 bicycle wheel and a long length or rope, 40 foot would be ideal, Connect the 2 ends of the rope together so you have a complete circle, Take one wheel and place it in the ground in the river where the current is strong, Then take the other wheel and place that 20 foot further down the river, Make some scoops and place them every 2 ft apart and connect them to the rope, Place the rope around both wheel and watch the current drag the scoops down the river and out of the water and back to the first wheel repeating the process, Most rivers run all the time.
Connect a coil to the wheel and bobs your uncle.
the other thing you need is a river - not a lot of folks have that mate - but if you do have one handy - awesome idea
Very nice! That's a classic example! I hope you cover bouyancy generation and storage at some point.. I personally find it quite amazing.
will do mate
The best and working gravity battery I have ever seen is a hydropower plant. A reservoire of water with a dam.
This one right here hits the nail on the head and in looking to smoothen the rotational to linear conversion, I've though of using the Scotch Yoke attached to the pendulum instead of an escarpment mechanism. Can't wait to see your next video!
Oh! and for greater depth of discharge, a block and tackle can help with that!
i like the block and tackle idea mate - that is clever thinking - tank you for sharing - i really do like that
@@ThinkingandTinkering Not quite sure my original message was as clear as it could have been... but I'll try to elaborate a bit more. The pendulum should be hanging from a movable pivot to control the frequency and the linear output of the Scotch Yoke should be stationary at the top end of the fulcrum as an input. I hope my words make sense lol Cheers!
As a clock maker might I suggest that you use an addaption of the strike mechanism as it will give a constant smooth power speed of which is controlled by gears and a fan
Simple to do is add a coiled spring between the "clock" output shaft and whatever shaft you want to drive...just needs to avoid resonance between clock and load...
springs are expensive and have lower energy density than a rock mate
You will find that Martin from 'Wintergaten' channel made some really nice improvements on the escapement mechanism concepts, based on comments from his channel participants that he applied to the MMX, particularly on the escapement arm angles so that there is less friction on the escapement wheel and less gear backpush or backlash as it goes through a cycle.
i will check it out mate - cheers
Ha! Was literally thinking about Martin when Rob brought out the escapement idea... yeah I second this - they've gone through a lot of iterations to arrive at some pretty awesome conclusions and optimisations for the escapement mechanism. Rob's and Wintergatan's channels are the only channels I've subscribed to and watch almost religiously on youtube 😁👍 Will we see a marble machine electrical energy generator in the near future??
And you could use a wind turbine to "charge" this energy battery. Wind it up during windy times and discharge during still times. The weight could also be used to add pressure to an accumulator.
Something i was thinking about today is a watch mainspring.
It can be wound at the same time energy is extracted from it.
A gravity battery could be "charged" as it falls leading to 0 downtime
yes i guess it could
What I find is amazing is you can do the same thing with high pressure tanks and compressed air units work amazingly … there’s a gentleman who produced an air motor for cars that have two 16” inch diameter air tanks 6 ft long that give the car something like 250 miles per fill up …. Use that air motor to turn a genset or permanent magnet motor to produce power, use solar to run a compressor to fill the tanks and you can have a small room 8x8 filled with the high pressure tanks which will give you enough air to run a few houses off grid 24 hrs a day
It will not take much solar to run the compressor, maybe 1000 watts of solar on a dc powered Pma to turn the compressor
You can use a mechanical powered windmill to turn a compressor head too
i am a huge fan of compressed air too
Pendulum weighted magnet should supply nice a/c pulsed power at a set rate/time. Very nice.
I would suggest just one tooth, so once released it travels a full revolution down giving the weight enough distance to generate more usable downward velocity.
So add a flywheel with a one way clutch to even out the jerkiness and the pendulum controls imparting the weights energy into the flywheel. The flywheel connects to a generator, and presto, youve got power. Very cool!
I would just use a band brake to stop the falling when not needed and then let it power a flywheel generator when needed.
You have that 3d printer dialed in well ! :D
Makes me think of all the dis-used coalmine lift shafts, some are miles deep. Use water for ballast and release it at the bottom, less energy required to bring it back up.
yep - there are just loads!
There's that gravity powered mechanism which spins a falling flywheel around vertical axis, usually sold as a kinetic sculpture/toy. It has 2 bits of string attached that unwind as it falls, then wind/draw it part of the way back up again. Maybe easier/cheaper to make, and using something like UHMWPE rope it could hold a very heavy weight.
A yo-yo? 😂
Gravity batteries don't self-discharge, but they aren't 100% efficient. The electric motor which hoists it is going to be something like 85% efficient, and the dynamo lowering it will be similar.
I love water gravity, like cliff railway as the downside is you have to lift the weight back up. All we need is a source of water. Plenty of coastal area where water streams flow out to sea.
yeah - wish i lived in Wales!
We already have these in giant dams. This is limited by land, property management and many other issues. We have maxed out it's cheapest availability.
I see one big flaw with a Gravity Power Generator. If the current required is low the “rock” will fall very quickly. If the current required is extreme, the “rock” will fall slowly. If the current is very, very high the “rock” will stop! After all, it is a breaking mechanism like that found in hybrid and electric cars.
The escapement controls the output.
You could put magnets straight on the escapement wheel. Yes the power output would be spiky, but that's simpler and probably more efficient to handle electrically with a capacitor and a couple of diodes than by complicating the mechanism. You don't even need a full rectifier because the motion's only going one way.
1. You can use a old saw blade :)
2. This is not only a battery. It is a engine too. Example: i will try to use it to let a solar panel follow the sun :)
3. A important thing is the efficiency of using energie. Example: a normal electric car vs. a Peraves Ecomobile
Leonardo da Vinci created a spring driven car that could release the energy at a constant speed. It might work also for gravity energy.
Nice build and demonstration! You can't get any more reliable storage system than a gravity based one. I don't ever recall hearing about any time when Earth's gravity failed to work. LOL!
we would be in trouble if it did lol
There are multiple problems with gravity batteries lifting weights. The main one, and the one that makes the concept of lifting rocks non viable economically, Is that pumped storage exists. For those that point out that pumped storage requires suitable terrain for the dam, I remind you that water towers exist. And they can be built to match any scale that a "gravity battery" could be built to. If gravity batteries had any advantage over pumped storage, then we would be seeing them everywhere. The idea and technology isn't new. It one of the oldest means of storing energy humanity has. Just look at how grandfather clocks are powered.
thanks for this awesome work. be useful for so many little gadgets could be powered by weights or springs. be great for auto pellet feeders and the like
The problem seems to be that it requires energy to get the weight up to the top each time you drop it. Imagine a weight on board a boat or floating vessel of some kind. The boat is inside a giant tube. As you add water to the tube, the boat, with the weight, floats up. When it gets to the top, you turn on a tap and release the water. The boat, with the weight, gently falls to the bottom of the tube without any jerky movements. The speed of fall is determined by the rate at which the water leaves the tube.
How do you add water to the tube without spending money to pump it there? Use a ram pump or a number of ram pumps to lift it to the top of the tube. A ram pump can lift water several hundred feet. It's a slow, low capacity way to do it, but it costs nothing in terms of fuel. When the water is released, it can go to irrigation, straight back into the river, or be used in some other way.
This could be used on elevated land above a river valley. This is just an idea. I don't know how practical it would be. The locks in canals made me think about this.
that's not a problem mate - that's just life - your suggestion is also using energy to get the weight to the top - it's an interesting way but not energy free
@RobertMurraySmith I know it uses the energy from the flow of water in the river, but that energy costs nothing. The cost of the infrastructure has to be taken into account, of course.
This is not an energy source but an energy storage device. You charge it up by raising the weight, you discharge it by letting it fall
@@justtinkering6713 I know. The point I was trying to make, unsuccessfully, it seems, is that all energy storage devices need to be "charged" in some way. It takes a lot of energy to lift a large weight to "charge" a gravity battery. I was just considering a way of doing that cheaply.
It just struck me that the weight pulling down as the water level drops would provide some power, but the water could also drive a generator as it was drained.
@@Pwecko I'm passed my prime in doing the math but I would think that it discharges the same amount of foot pounds as it takes to charge it.
Image rigging such a system over a swimming pool! Presto! You have instant huge weight and that you can capture in a scoop or large bucket, and raise it up using solar panels etc. Potential for thousands of pounds of weight, and usable by any homeowner with a pool in back yard.
There's not a home pool big enough to make enough energy for home use. 5 or 6 pools maybe.
Now i know how old-school clocks works. Thank you!
I can’t wait to go out to my backyard clock tower in the morning and wind it up while it makes my coffee! 😂👍
I emailed elegoo about availability of their neptune 3 but they say they are discontinued in the UK. Not sure why. I bought a neptune 2s instead. Very impressed
they are good machines - i will have more to say about them soon but right now i am sworn to secrecy
No one ever thinks that you can use gas pressure as a battery. I think you can use light to generate pressure using a small electrolyzer of dissimilar metals in Clorox bleach. The gasses made will make tremendous pressure to run a steam or air engine. Though if you have one way valves and let the pressure move back to the expansion chamber it would be ideal or how ever that would work. The only problem is the oxygen and hydrogen may explode under enough pressure unless it is some sort of ion expansion. Though the obvious choice is compressed air or liquid nitrogen. Though the Diepetro engine never went commercial for what ever reason.
you can just use a compressor too mate and there are compressed air storage systems out there
Stanton's bicycle wheel, no gears, the magnets rotate around a copper/alu disc
i haven't looked at that i just read it was a magnetic gear and ignored it - i should look
Id like something like:
External fitted casing going in a column up a portion of my house, something i can paint or grow ivy up, with a gravity battery rig inside. If it could deliver a couple of hundred watts over say a half hour period this would be a really good way to "sip" from your solar rig on changeable days. Paired with a standard chemical battery, solar and water diverter youd further smooth out the peaks and troughs and extend the actual battery into the darker hours.
It could be quite sizable. Half a ton of concrete is not that much volume. The question what could that produce over around 5-6m. Not sure of the equation, presume its a fairly basic one i just need it identify the right one to know if my idea is worthless lol
Oof did the maths. 6-7 tons over half an hour if you want it delivering 200w over 5m.
I guess forget that idea for residential lol
Or my maths is wrong. Not my strong suit.
it's basically mass time height times gravity
Maybe the jerky movement could power an air pump to make a buoyancy device that rises up a column of water then lets the air out at the top and sinks back down ?.
It’s really a “Density” Battery. But nonetheless I love them, will build a large one one day
Hi mate hope all is well.
I think a gravity battery is a great idea and I think they are much much more convenient and would be enough for some led lights and a bit more at night. I think solar can wind it up/supply electric in the day and this at night. I shall have a little go myself and see how I get on but keep up the good work. Thank you xxx
i have had an inspiration mate - i will be exploring it
I would like to see a stirling engine using sunlight and gravity battery for storage. Like to see how it would all work
Use an old floating oil drilling plattform (or make a new one), maneuver it above the mariana trench and let it lift and drop a 1000 t weight down there. Thats around 30000 kWh stored energy. Recharge by solar and wind.
I had been thinking of something similar but instead of a fly wheel I was looking at generation at the pendulum and using diodes and a capacitor to smooth the signal out. It would minimize mechanical loss and just be simpler all around.
Its always funny seeing Luke(?) try to match Rob's energy.
Great stuff guys.
he is developing his own style mate
@@ThinkingandTinkering Good to hear :)
Will we see more of Luke in the upcoming videos?
Thank you. I find your work very interesting.
cheers mate
A 1000kg object raised 367m represents 1kwh of energy. This is slightly less than an average lead acid car battery capacity. Enthusiasm is great, but with a little rationality and understanding of quantities of energy and the scale of engineering required to store mechanical potential energy, one can then understand why gravity batteries are of very limited use case.
A cubic metre of water falling a single metre is the equivalent of 1kW of energy.
A litre of water weighs one kg.
A cubic metre of water therefore weighs 1,000 kg.
Redo your sums.
Cool idea. It set me to thinking about magnetic/eddy current braking possibly being more efficient and less complicated.
that is a cool idea - got me thinking mate - cheers
Another thing would be a magnet at the end of the pendulum and a coil for it to pass by to generate some small electricity. (Or an arc of coils to generate more)
That would use the pull of the magnet against the coil to slow the pendulum as well.
A very great video with pictures that have finally given me the idea on how to go about building a gravity battery. From my onboard HHO generation experiments I remember that a car alternator becomes heavier and heavier to turn if you set up the electrolyzer to pull more amps and make more gas, and how I found 5 amps to be the optimal draw to notice improvement in fuel economy with it. So with that in mind a few more ideas have come to mind, in order to control the falling speed of a suspended weight. Of course the force making the alternator's pulley more resistant to rotation is magnetism. So something along that line for one thing. It will require iterations with different weights and the charging power my home system needs. I particularly like the water bottle suspended from the roof picture. So 30 amps @ 52 volts for, say, four hours, after the sun goes down. Something to start the design. :) Thank you kindly sir. Especially now I am, and the world is, under the boot heel of the way economics work and inflation as you may know. Another idea I can think of is using a "speed governor" system which is electronically and automatically controlled. I am a civil engineer but I self taught my self electrical and electronics over the course of a few years to build stuff like this. :D
HHO never increases fuel economy. Testing inconsistencies are the only time it “works”. It’s physics and the law of thermodynamics.
@@_..-.._..-.._yes onboard HHO doesn't cut it. That's why I went offboard production + storage.
Hi Robert,
Sorry to be the pourer of cold-water, but the premise upon which you decided you needed some sort of speed regulator, to stop the weight simply falling down, is totally incorrect. The rate at which the weight drops is governed by the amount of power the generator is producing. P = m.g.v, which rearranges to v = P/ (m.g).
Example: We are dropping a 100kg weight and our power output is 1000W. Taking g = 9.81 m/s² then our weight will have to be dropping at v = 1000/(100x9.81) = 1.02m/s. To be efficient, the gearing will have to be arranged so that, at the generator’s rated RPM, the weight will be dropping at that speed. Alter the weight, speed or power and at least one of the other two will have to be altered to match.
In other words your escapement wheel and pendulum are both unnecessary and a hindrance, rather than a help. You do NOT want stop/go motion if you’re using a generator. They’re designed for maximum efficiency, at a particular, constant rpm.
Have you thought of enrolling, on line, for classes in Physics? I feel you would make much better progress if you understood some more of the basics.
Please keep on your tinkering. It may not seem like it from my comments, but I’m a fan.😊
You should make a video response to this video. You know, demonstrate some of the basic physics that you think he doesn't understand.
Did you even watch the entire 8 minute 40 second video? Your comment makes it seem very much like you did not. Or that you did not understand most of what was being discussed if you did.
Enjoy your day mate. They all end.
Other thing is chemical battery wear out and loses capacity. Weight battery with well lubricated system and good component quality doesn't lose that much. If it lose some efficienxy, just replace mechanical part that failed!
I think it's probably possible to even create weight battery powered vehicle.
i like the ambition in that thinking mate
Gravity batteries are a great idea until you consider the logistics of, say, wind forces, wear and tear on the mechanisms that have to shuffle the blocks around, wear and tear on the blocks themselves, the infrastructure itself, etc. You mention that you're "being glib to make a point" which I appreciate, but I do wish we'd focus more on pumped hydro! If we could fill old mines (like at 2:18) either directly or with storage tanks we could make use of a closed loop pumped hydro. Maybe even using toxic waste water from the mines themselves to better quarantine it.
That said, with regards to control, a hybrid flywheel, gear reduction, gravity battery could be pretty efficient too. Use gravity to spin up the flywheel and then use the flywheel to run the generator. That might reduce the amount of shuffling you'd need to do as well
that last idea is clever mate thanks for sharing
Let's go further and use a sand battery as the payload. If we put everything in a dwell, the water column would provide a good gradient of temperature in conjuction with the stirling engine to convert the heat back into electricity. Where is my shovel...
You could put the "pendulum power generator" setup you did on here to generate more power as well. I think the pendulum aspect would produce more power than spinning a generator, but it would have to be tested to be certain.
Can’t wait to see it charged by a turbine or a mechanical rectifier! I’m festinated by pendulum clocks and even thought quite a bit about trying to build an escapement mechanism to drive a player piano.
you should do it mate
you could also look into the use of air paddles to slow the release of the weight, or a brake mechanism attached to a flyball governor.
for sure mate
Any sort of friction brake (using air resistance or friction material) is effectively wasting the eneregy that has been stored so you would want to avoid is in anything except a dire emergency. But I agree that any gravity battery is likely to need some sort of emergency brake. Realistically any commercial gravity battery is going to have to employ the same sort of independent brake that lift cars use, in case the winding gear or cable fails.
Interesting. I've been thinking and researching along the exact same line. I've heard clock gearing is highly efficient, and the length of the pendulum changes the speed according to pendulum theory. Since the movement is in the pendulum , thinking out loud here, perhaps put a series of magnets stators on the pendulum itself? Or perhaps align two different pendulums to steady out the flow like a two phase pendulum? Great fun ty!
I'm just a girl on the Internet and not an engineer, but this is fascinating to me. If we can regenerate energy from braking systems on cars, can we recapture energy from elevators in tall buildings?
Frankly yes, that could be possible.
But for that we would need to change a bit how Elevators work.
Atm Elevators all have a counterweight, one goes up as the other goes down. The cable between the two moves over a big drum, which in turn is connected to the motor up in the mechanics. And that motor just moves the difference between the empty cabin and a full one.
So not much energy is needed to move the Cabin tbh, or rather in this context, no energy is stored.
If we want to use elevators to store energy, your would have to remove the counterweight and use the weight of the passengers to generate electricity instead of using it to lower the cabin.
yes we can there is an experimental set up in India using the lift shafts to do exactly that
@@Luziferne I do know how elevators work. Lots of open lifts here in Mexico, and they fascinate me. However, regenerative braking is a completely different aspect, and it's okay if a girl whose husband was a Porsche engineer for a racing team knows a thing or two about regenerative braking and has an aha! moment watching a video about gravity batteries.
@@ThinkingandTinkering Oooh , thanks! Off to find out more. You are the best!
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong:
Isn't 100% of the energy of the falling weight being used in order to push the pendulum? Does not the pendulum need to be balanced with how much energy the falling weight can provide in order for this mechanism to work? If you were to try to capture any of the energy of the system it would slow the pendulum and cause the device to stop working.
You’re 100% correct. Unfortunately this entire mechanism is a complete waste of energy as it is being used to maintain the motion of the pendulum. Proper gearing to a DC motor allows the rotation at the correct RPM and torque to generate the maximum electricity as per the efficiency of the generator. I’ve never seen him lead us astray like this he must really be sick. But it is a fun mechanism
the penulum timing is set by its length. Only a tiny bit of energy is needed to catch and release the latch from the pendulum arc momemtum. If the arc is not limited to this small amount then the pendulums swing will increase cummulatively, but not its period. The excess energy is from the weight drop hammering the catch. Instead the drop can pulse spin a flywheel by regular amounts
A couple of thoughts:
- I always cringe when you use the Energy Vault image. I was initially enchanted by it, but it has some real problems with energy density, crane sway, and especially fault tolerance (dealing with high winds, earthquakes, vandalism, software errors, etc.) However, I have hope for Gravitricity, a UK company investigating the feasibility of repurposing exhausted mines as gravity battery installations. They seem like realistic engineers doing practical work.
- I know pendulums can be very high-efficiency, but I'd be curious to know how much of the stored energy is lost pushing the pendulum.
- Thank you for your practical, hobby-/home-scale gravity battery videos! I love the non-volatility and elegance of gravity batteries, even though their energy density is very poor. I dream of a future with a variety of generation and energy storage mechanisms that are used appropriate to whatever is needed.
me too and such a shame about energy vault though i do like the old mine idea
The key to efficient storage is decent height (or depth), otherwise the energy density is just too low for the capital cost. It occurred to me while watching this video that bulk ore carriers can carry up to 300,000 tonnes (VLOC's) or more of iron ore. Sit them just off a continental shelf at 4000m to the ocean floor , and that ore has some 9000 GJ of energy (100 MW of generating capacity for 24 hours) if it were dropped to the sea floor on a winch connected to a generator that is $124,000 worth of electricity at 0.05c/kWhr. So perhaps a ship heading to the scrapyard could be repurposed as a gravity battery and made economically viable, especially if you could integrate wave/wind power.
or pulleys
@@ThinkingandTinkering In Australia they have a long railway for iron ore that falls all the way to the port. But this only really generated enough to get the empties back up again.
@@ThinkingandTinkering Ok with extreme weights you need extreme tensile strength in rope and structure. I even looked at storing energy in several tens of kilometers of rope tension at some point. The capital cost at low energy density just kills small scale 😭
Hi just a little bit out of the box, could you not take a lot of old spent heavy chemical batteries, then use them as a man made stone, no need to dump them.👍🐝🌞
cool!
They tend to be rather light for their volume, intentionally so (The heavy lead ones currently get recycled.) Also using batteries as weights brings with it all the toxicity problems that gravity batteries are trying to solve
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I love the subtle energy mechanics of BioGeometry. Using subtle energy to magnify and direct qualities instead of quantities is the future IMO.
Dr Ibrahim Karim and Dr Robert Gilbert also know about this.
Great shows I love watching these videos and you make so many of them bravo 👏 🙌 keep it up!
Thank you!
cheers mate
I would love to see more videos based on vortex mechanics like Viktor Schauburger stuff. Also the hydrophobic EZ water filter concepts are bizarre I'd love to see some stuff that you would do with that data!
Thanks again cheers!!
Great idea , this system has been used in watches for hundreds of years
What about a large column of concrete inside a tube with a generator/motor for lowering and raising but before it goes up it goes into a semi vacuum to reduce the load to raise the weight.
This eliminates any momentum the weights might build which is theoretical mass and therefore extra energy ripe for the taking
If you drop the weight 10 meters and let it fall fast you'll get more energy from stopping it than you would if you dropped them 10 meters in 1 meter increments
I feel like it'd be better with some sort of variable gear system. Let it build momentum on the way down then shift the gear ratio as it gets lower
Brilliant! I too have invented the heavy house on stilts that lifts overnight using low rate hydro with geared worm drive, reversing direction to return potential energy to geared down output (ever tried turning a clock movement backwards from power train outwards, to click the escapement?)
I invented the 'heavy' car park, where the car park is raised on hydraulic rams at night (when there is cheap electricity), and where the cars that park in it can be recharged during the day by allowing the carpark to fall down to it's lower level. (The electric cars would use the same amount of energy to climb into the car park as their own weight would return in power generated as the car park falls, but the weight of the carpark itself would provide the power to recharge the cars).
@@tlangdon12 Lol!! Makes sense, you would 'steal' the car owner's electricity and sell it back to them by making the carparks taller than they should be and lower them in time for when they want it...! Cheaper night electricity is increasing becoming a myth because of EVs btw. If I knew where to start I would have thought using EVs for bi-directional grid storage would have been a good idea, but I'm not sure.
i like the idea of using the whole building
Great! That's a funny coincidence. I'm trying exactly the same thing right now. I chose the classic Graham escapement as used in many grandfathers' clocks. I've uploaded a short video snippet to my RUclips "channel". I really like your clean design and the closed shape. My next step is to connect it to a stepper motor, or maybe a modification of your mechanical rectifier first. 🙂
i went and looked nice job mate
I've thought about utilizing a 10speed rear bicycle wheel as a means to use a weight to turn the chain through a set of gears to spin a generator of some sort.....always thought it would be a fun project......but other fun projects seem to get in the way of this one. seems it would be an easy thing to reset and the bike wheel will ratchet to reset the weight...perhaps I will try to move this project to a higher priority in the tinker list.
The most you can power is charging your phone for a brief period with that. Many have done that. Look it up on RUclips. Search words Bike alternator generator charge
Given that there is an inevitable energy loss for every step of conversion, would it be more efficient or better to harvest and store energy in the same form they are collected in and only convert it if the needed form of energy is depleted? e.g. collecting and storing heat to use primarily for heating purposes (I don't know how that would work for getting 200 plus Celsius for cooking); storing compressed air for pressurizing a well or your waterlines; I would even go as far as to say filtering and storing low pressure oxygen for regulating in-home O2 levels.
Absolutely awesome mate.
For a smoother action I suppose one could also have a dozen escapements of slightly different phases.
It's a rock ! lol
"Good enough is in reality, perfection" Sir Robert Murray-Smith
lol - cheers mate
A magnet attached to the pendulum swinging by a coil would probably generate enough electricity to make an LED flash. Yet another way to power a system do deter rodents in dark buildings and the like. (At least the rodents around here hate flashing lights.)
we did that in a previous video mate
Just an idea regarding the mass and lifting mechanism. 🤔
If the mass is lifted by a rope using multiple pulleys then the height becomes reasonable and provides more power in less space 😉