Grum
Can you post more on this ?
Tinsel
what about tubes with Mercury ? and magnetic or Diamagnetic experiments {bhaskara wheel ] even incorporating a Charge into the mix [this is one on my Bucket list ]?
also do you remember the Jack Abeling wheel ? that is one I am toying with while I wait on the Nitinol choice [Smokey is helping with the best
Nitinol product for these experiments ??]
I will look for the Abeling Link
Also wanting to make a copper pickup rail on the wheel with magnets to assist in Output measurements and also to teach the Kids about induction .
all thoughts and comments welcomed
Mercury (dissolved salt, foot-soak, etc) : From a given starting RPM, a heavier wheel will of course spin longer before stopping than a lighter wheel will. This has fooled a lot of people working with gravity wheels and magnet wheels etc. "If I just make it heavy enough it will surely keep on turning, see how it turns longer and longer as I add weight." But this (same starting RPM) is the wrong way to test this; the experimenter must be able to supply the same starting impulse or energy, which will result in different start RPMs as the weight (rotational inertia) is varied. My videos on the Mondrasek magnet-assisted gravity wheel illustrate an easy way to supply a repeatable starting impulse to a wheel. There are also other valid ways of equalizing start energy for testing wheels.
Any wheel design (almost) can be made to turn if you supply a source of power and couple that power to the wheel properly. Nitinol, for example, requires cycling between hot and cold temperatures to flex in a cycle, and there are many ways that a Nitinol shape can be coupled to a wheel to make it rotate. But you have to supply the heat energy it is going to run on. My favorite Nitinol application is a stage magician's trick: the Bent Nail. It is made of Nitinol and when warmed by rubbing in the hand, it becomes straight. "Oh look, I found a bent nail on the ground. I'll bet I can straighten it with my mind, Uri-Geller-Style. Wanna bet a cheezburger?"
Nitinol is also used for such things as automatic sun-shutters, solar tracking PV arrays, etc. Here the source of heat energy is solar, or waste heat from industrial processes. No free lunch in sight (unless you fool people with the Bent Nail trick.)
As far as heat engines go, I prefer Stirling. Used to be you could buy a Stirling cycle fan that you set on top of your pot-bellied wood stove. It ran on the heat difference between the stovetop and the room air, and the fan blew the hot air from the stove around the room. I have a design in my head of a free-piston Stirling cycle alternator/generator that would be a neat thing to see... but I need my tools to build it. Only one moving part!
We've seen in Grum's work how to make a wheel spin with application of a charge (strictly speaking, a charge differential, aka potential aka voltage) to charge carriers on the wheel. At you-know-where I had a horizontal bike wheel with a bunch of bronze spheres mounted (insulated) all around it, and I was able to get it to spin at a potential of only around 500-600 volts, which amazed us all (and caused no end of difficulty because that was not the source of thrust we wanted to see ... )
Still the same old story: the power to turn the wheel has to come from somewhere, and it can't come from gravity alone, PMs alone, etc. as they are only storage mechanisms, not sources.
Good luck with your Abeling wheel, be sure to make a recording, I don't want to hear stories of "it just took off, slipped the mount and went right through the garage door, and the last time I saw it, it was two blocks away and accelerating..."