/r/humanpower
Examples of human assisted vehicles and machines (such as bicycle drives, air pressure and possibly electricity generation). Sail power, hydrolics, pneumatics, and enviromental thermal/light power generation also welcome.
Focusing on physics, and design ideas that are ideally shared and that can assist someone (and then ideally everyone) in creating useful human power assisted machine prototypes.
Examples of human assisted vehicles and machines (such as bicycle drives, air pressure and possibly electricity generation). Sail power, hydrolics, pneumatics, and enviromental thermal/light power generation also welcome.
Focusing on physics, and design ideas that are ideally shared and that can assist someone (and then ideally everyone) in creating useful human power assisted machine prototypes.
/r/humanpower
Here is a 5w 5000ah solar battery system
It is well designed in that the surface area is maximized, and connectors and interface are flush, and so can be joined with simple connectors. At only 90 cm^2 area, it achieves over 500W per square meter.
In sunshine, 20 of these could provide 100W output while charging 100W. From full with no sun, there is 3.5 hours range.
Other battery systems have 2.1A output and so 10 units can provide 105W total output. The one linked is the most efficient solar to space one that I found.
A hybrid arrangement of 10 of these with 10 non-solar banks with 10.5W output but 15ah (3.7) capacity, would have @ 105W output:
10 hours of no sun range. (20 total ah per 10 outputs with solar feeding into non-solar bank)
Perhaps burstable 155W power output. (serial arrangement)
In serial arrangement with sun, would be only a net 55W power draw, and so nearly double the range.
In intermittent sun, if solar packs can get about half efficiency, then they can ouput 50W for 5 hours, and so 155W combined system output for 5 hours would be possible.
The efficiency of a bicycle drive significantly comes from rotary motion that conserves momentum. Leg power is also significantly stronger (for able bodied people) than arm power.
A vane compressor uses rotary motion at any rpm's to compress air. It can do so in multiple stages which enhances efficiency. Multiple stages also reduce the stress on any single vane, and so can allow light weight plastics as a material for the whole motor.
While pressurized air has energy losses when compressing and decompressing, those losses occur as a result of difficulty of achieving high compression ratios, and pressure and heat loss that occurs over time.
The difficulty of commercial air vehicles is IMO related to the innefficiency and safety concerns of high pressure storage, for range maximization. Human powered pneumatics with minimal/optional storage might be able to overcome these issues.
pneumatic drives would have the benefit of directly activating mechanics with little or no intermediate compression stage.
Advantages of pneumatic drives:
Storage of power to compress air and use that power for anything.