>Hi all, seem's there may be one or two misconceptions with the spring power
>idea I was proposing,
>A) this thing isn't intended to run a recharge circuit, It's a direct
>repalcement for the battery..
>B) by 'pumping' the lever I was implying several strokes of the lever applyed
>to a ratchet system...
>C) what I was suggesting had nothing to do with walking.. The coment oboat
>standing on the thing was
> just a practical consideration concerning how to put the most power into
>each charging stroke.
The nice thing about the calculations I gave is that they transfer easily
to these other situations.
A) Whether the battery is being charged or replaced is merely a question
of whether you have a holding tank for the energy (namely the battery)
or use it right away. The amount of energy is the same in each case.
B) If the lever can only move 2 inches and you have to move it 36 feet,
this translates to having to pump it (36*12)/2 = 216 times.
C) It's irrelevant whether the vertical motion is walking, climbing,
whatever, the only relevant factors in computing the work done are
(i) how hard you push on the lever, regardless of whether you push
vertically or horizontally, and
(ii) how far the lever moves altogether, regardless of whether it
moves in one very long stroke or a lot of short strokes.
>by the way by "severely stiff spring" I'm thinking of something that would
>'allmost' need a break press to compress!
Now *that* is worth some serious discussion. What you're doing when you
compress a solid (as opposed to a gas that is nowhere near liquefying)
is playing with the Van der Waal force between atoms. This is on roughly
the same scale as the electron binding forces that rechargeable batteries
play with. So compression technology of this kind is in a sense in
head-to-head competition with rechargeable technology. A necessary
trick here is to be able to release the compression force very gradually,
to get an even rate of discharge over a usefully long time.
I wish I could wax more quantitative about these atomic and electronic
forces but I *hated* chemistry as a freshman and replaced it with
statistics in second year. As a rough generality, the more intimate
you get with the atom, the more powerful the forces. Thus compression
probably won't buy you as much as fiddling with electron orbit energies,
which in turn won't be anywhere near as strong as anything you can
get from rearranging the nucleus such as superlong battery life and a
glowing personality.
Vaughan
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