Mechanical Power Systems From The Wind

Mechanical Power Systems From The Wind

This paper is for all those farmers and ranchers who live and love their wind-swept land and want to make a living from it but it’s hard.

There are some things very standard to farming, and by brand the PTO, Power Take-Off unit is one of those things. What drives that unit is usually a shaft from the engine of the tractor, so this is to add a unit with industrial springs that are storing energy, these wound-up by windmills in a system of carts & conveyors that automatically keeps winding things up when the wind blows and stacking them ready to pick up and cart them to the fields.

These are dangerous levels of spring power. It demands designing in safety on an industrial scale to drive a mower, what happens when a spring or ratchet breaks and so on.

So, this is a very simple concept, to work best the windmill may be of another type, one designed for stormy weather, one that doesn’t shut down in big gusty winds, instead it cranks them out because that is the policy to follow with natural systems, get it while you can.

Sand dunes sit, until the strong winds hit.

The burden then becomes having enough units to do the actual work-per-second needed to drive the acreage for the next, how many can be afforded ends somewhere and after that hook them up to a biodiesel fed engine and call it good because the wind doesn’t always blow but all that was saved in expenses per acre to work the land, per year.

To design all this to a first prototype system is a worthy enterprise for farm equipment manufacturers to consider.

Without the unique windmill, my assessment is the watts won’t be there to move much dirt but could supply seeding and other less powerful needs per acre. Since most windmills shut down above 30-knots, design examples of those that operate in strong wind is spartan and historical; my first approach to this was in the late 1970’s, so, the recent addition in figuring out springs and ratchets can be wound up by a variable wind to high mechanical torque and basically no loss in energy, nice combo!

Easy to see how it'd really reduce the yearly costs on any farm or ranch with these smaller uses that seem to deserve their own systems, like for rotary power for hand tools, wind-up toys that do work.

Taking this into the other processes on a ranch or farm, dairy cows, prairie cattle, row crops to hand-dug back yards moving dirt takes a lot of watts, that’s an outlet for these units, to be designed to specific purposes from running compressors to conveyor belts to shop equipment, designed to step-down the high torque to a steady output that lasts so many minutes per PSU, Power Storage Unit.

May this concept inspire, my desire is to put that paperwork into 3dcad … someday, over the rainbow ...

Just figured out these would be easy to scale down to use in refrigerators that use compressors, very nice, had thought of hand tool powering with springs before, this puts intermittent wind-power into the kitchen! Most small appliances can be powered by a standard base using spring units ... the drawings will flow.