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I often find it weird that we don't have more devices powered by gravity / heavy weight, except our old school scales for weighing our bodies.
by tiku 3y ago
I often find it weird that we don't have more devices powered by gravity / heavy weight, except our old school scales for weighing our bodies.
- berkes 3y agoIn order to store any significant energy, you'd need great heights or giant mass. Both rather impractical. That said, one of the oldest energy captures is a watermill. It's powered by gravity.
- mdiesel 3y agoCounterbalances are in use all over the place, look at lifts (/elevators) if they didn't have the weights they'd need much much more energy to move the system. Almost everything that works with weights+heights will have some kind of counterbalance system. Hydroelectric energy storage is one example that is hugely successful, albeit requiring geography to help. We also use water towers in some places to maintain pressure in pipes with the hydraulic head. On a smaller scale, it's more space efficient to use weights to store rotating energy as a flywheel. That said, stored energy in a system isn't always a desirable property, generally it means more careful designs are needed so that the system defaults to safe.
- sho_hn 3y agoThere are many mechanisms powered by the Huygens weight drive + a governor, for example many clocks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintaining_power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintaining_power
- a1o 3y agoHere is the cool interactive blog https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/