My Invention: Reciprocating Mechanism for Harvesting Gravitational Potential Energy

My Invention: Reciprocating Tow Generator / Engine by Jimmy Locke
Video taken in 2009 in Fife. Its a first prototype... a bit shabby but it seems to work :)

This is the water wheel without the wheel. Thought of this a ways back while thinking about fishing. Could a fish that is pulling a reel generate electricity? Why not replace the fish with something bigger?

This is a mechanism for harvesting energy whether gravitational from falling/flowing water, buoyancy forces, or wind. This particular prototype is meant for harvesting energy from rain fall. It works by alternatingly filling and emptying buckets to produce a reciprocating motion of a pulley. A drive shaft would be connected to the pulley to harvest the reciprocating motion into something useful e.g generating electricity or a mechanical application.

This configuration is great for harvesting low flow, high head water sources such as rain from a gutter or a small waterfall. The bucket will wait until sufficient water has been collected and then accelerate downward, due to whatever torque requirements the load will introduce to affix the bucket in place... It could be mounted to the roofs of sky scrapers to collect rain as power...

An alternate configuration for say a river would be to place the pulley along the river and have two floating "buckets" or boats which alternatingly cause more drag than the other, thereby producing the same reciprocating motion.

Yet another configuration would be to use two kites and harvest wind energy and have each kite collapse.

Yet another configuration would be to use two hot air balloons or two buoyant "submarines" connected by pulley to cause reciprocation motion.

Another application would be to drive the two pulley's and to use the device as a water propulsion device.

The two buckets can be configured inline such that the each of the two buckets travel half stroke to span the entire distance of collection. Furthermore additional pulleys can be added per bucket to increase mechanical advantage to whatever degree necessary.

Видео My Invention: Reciprocating Mechanism for Harvesting Gravitational Potential Energy канала Locke Lab