Gravity Powered Light GravityLight

http://deciwatt.org/

GravityLight.  Simple and elegant. 

This is similar to an idea I had a while back... only much more elegantly developed.  Must dust off my plans and take another look. 

Airdrop irrigator

http://www.coolhunting.com/tech/airdrop.php
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/australian-designer-edward-linacres-irrigation-system-turns-air-into-water/story-fn5fsgyc-1226190299339?sv=4f37d4cce45df488505434ab6312f7ba
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/water-from-thin-air-aussie-eds-airdrop-an-international-hit-20111110-1n8ks.html

These articles all cover the same item in various detail.  Great idea. 

Power from an unusual source

http://3.14.by/en/read/building-nuclear-reactor-at-home

Interesting hack for powering low power device in remote area for long periods of time.

Energy Accumulators Game

What's a primitive energy accumulator?

Ok, the rules of the game are:

1. Must be found/built by a single person.
2. Must not require tools/equipment than can't be carried/transported by a single person.
3. Must be maintainable by the same person or another similarly versed with the same tools.
4. The design must be able to be communicated verbally.
5. Uses common/found/grown/scavenged materials.

6. Energy must be able to be input into the system.
7. Energy must be extractable from the system on demand (Within an hour of that demand anyway..)
8. The system must be re-usable ( not consumed apart from general wear and tear or environmental damage)
9. The system must be reliably efficient ( I.e It can be be low efficiency but it should be similarly efficient between uses. Not unpredictable is the the point)

10. The system must be useful and reasonable for the intended purpose and the need cycle of that purpose. (i.e no possible but implausible systems)
11. The design must be implementable at more than one site. ( I.e not dependant upon some unique site specific feature/s)
12. The system must be implementable within a reasonable period of time (<1yr)

Strandbeest and low cost primative energy accumulators

http://www.strandbeest.com/beests_storage.php

I could enjoy playing with something like this. The next level is to add some primitive sensors and directionality to the beast so it can sense the wind and direct itself into the wind in such a way as to optimize its energy input.

Then give it a sense of energy conservation, so it can evaluate its own energy stores and decide to conserve energy when the wind ( energy source ) is low.

This is an interesting example of very low tech energy accumulators. It uses air pressure and polycarbonate bottles as the pressure vessels. All you need is a pump, pipes and some valves and you have a cheap, maintainable and accessible energy system. Its low power and low availability but simple enough to set up anywhere there is wind.

Once you have some sort of turbine or other converter you could hook all sorts of wind sources ( steam, vapor, waste air pressure etc) into the same system.

Building a low efficiency turbine using similar materials and some sort of magnets and induction coils should be fairly straight forward. The materials are getting a little more exotic however. (Copper wire and some magnets) but still fairly easily scrounged from any stream of modern waste.
If you have access to old electric motors then you are already there, just run it backwards. So you have the ability to harvest wind energy, store it and deploy on demand.

Now we just need a big enough bottle farm to hold all the accumulated energy without leaking.

I remember seeing a low tech bio-gas pressure system made from two water tanks, one large open topped one ( which could be replaced by a simple dam or large puddle) and half filled with water to form the seal. The second tank was upside down and held the gas. The gas was pumped into the tank under low pressure and the tank rose. Then they simply added some bricks and rocks to the top of the tank to increase the pressure and thus had a high pressure source of bio-gas to run the stove.

You could do something similar with this kind of rig.  Just use the wind power to pump air at low pressure into vessels then change the pressure by adding something easy ( say water ) which can be pumped around to add weight to the vessel.  Then you have a high pressure air source to generate power on demand.  The stored potential energy can act as a large, simple battery.

Orbo overunity system

http://www.steorn.com/

This is an interesting bit of gear. I have been thinking about utilising magnets as an energy accumulation system. This one is more useful because its cyclical and can be used to generate work directly.

The obvious application for this system is to firstly bootstrap it with a passive energy source ( photo voltaic cells ), then drive it from its own generated current plus tap it for energy.  This becomes a simple power source that does not need anything more than enough sunlight to bootstrap it.

The heat dissipation could either be harvested or dumped. It may be a small problem in an enclosed system but heat can easily be radiated through a case. You would also need to be careful with inertia effects on the rotor if you were using it to run a high speed robot.

The next problem is power to weight ratio. Can you develop a light enough system that it can become self propelled. In which case you have a bootstrappable battery for small robots. If you could harvest additional power and store it using a non-degrading energy accumulator like a magnetic zip starter then you have something that can both bootstrap itself, store power infinity and be self propelled.

The only issues to deal with now are mechanical wear on the rotors and other mechanical parts.

The first solution is magnetic bearings in the rotor for the Orbo and some sort of frictionless propulsion for the robot.  Otherwise make a robot self repairing. Bit more complex but within scope if you can solve the power problem.

Later....