FlyboyEUC Posted June 8, 2019 Share Posted June 8, 2019 Had a thought. If you had 2 MSXs or 18XLs or monsters and trolleyed one while riding the other, could you theoretically travel 100+ miles in one sitting? The trolleying wheel would use almost no battery and you could tilt it back every so slightly to regenerate the battery. When the ridden wheel was getting low you could hop on the fully charged one. Would this work or would "energy be conserved" (for any of you science people out there)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ch.Eng.62 Posted June 8, 2019 Share Posted June 8, 2019 It is a kind of "perpetum mobile". Up to this moment we know that it is not possible. There is a lot of losses, from efficiency, friction and etc. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
esaj Posted June 8, 2019 Share Posted June 8, 2019 @Ch.Eng.62's right, you can't recover all the energy, so starting with two fully charged wheels, once you switched to the other wheel, the one you just rode near empty wouldn't recharge nowhere near fully while you trolleyed it and rode the second wheels battery to empty, but it could recover some charge. I don't think it needs to be tilted back, the regeneration should occur every time outside forces move the motor rather than the battery itself (of course the wheel needs to be turned on and controlling the mosfets), but the efficiency is likely not very high, so no idea if this produces enough power to actually recharge or if it produces even enough power to run the "unloaded" balancing, which shouldn't require much though. If it was indeed "actively" braking (that would make riding pretty hard if you hold the braking wheel by trolley on your other hand), then it would likely recover some more, because the wheel you're actually riding would have to work much harder (use more power/battery capacity) to move the braking wheel also. So no unlimited battery, but it would likely work up to a point, another matter is how difficult and "not fun" would it be riding around trolleying a second wheel all the time. Still it would be interesting to see how much battery could be regained through this. I'd guess not much compared to how much power is used by the other wheel actually "doing the driving", using the battery from 100% to near 0%, you'd likely get some fraction of this "back" to the trolleyed wheel battery, most of the power is used in actually moving you and the driving wheels' own mass, and some part of what's left is lost in regeneration, frictions etc... 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Fat Unicyclist Posted June 14, 2019 Share Posted June 14, 2019 If you tilted the "spare" wheel to attempt regeneration, the energy for the recharging would come at the cost of extra drain in the "pushing" wheel that you are riding... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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