Royce Barber

See my site at roycebarber.com and my art at DeviantArt . I love God . I like Ubuntu OS .

Spring Powered Car

How much energy could a metal spring (you know, like a stretched out slinky) contain?

A metal spring, one inch long (a reaaaaly small car shock i suppose..?), made of very high quality materials. Being slowly uncompressed, pushing a generator of some sort.

Do you think in the next 30 years that a spring could power a car?

I know it would take a lot of energy to compress a "super spring", but it would hold the energy much longer than a battery, right?

I know this could work. Our world could use springs instead of batteries.

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Topics:

energy, philosophy, future, alternative power, power, spring, invention, generator, power plant, gas alternative, coil

Posted 2009-01-12T09:48:57Z
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Kat

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You sound so fired up about this. INVENT this, make it happen! Passion for something creates the best and most useful and helpful things. Start with a derby car... then move up to the big boys. Have fun, and hurry it up, will ya? :)

*Kat

Posted 2009-01-26T19:25:48Z

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hayesatlbch

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Power is power. Energy is energy. There is usually a little loss when you change from one form of power or energy to another.

That being said , your idea has promise if you can capture some kind of free energy to be used later in the car.

Imagine a float on the ocean that provides the energy to compress your spring when it rises and falls with waves and/or tide.

Imagine a small solar powered motor that compresses the spring with solar energy.

There are many possibilities but you need to get energy that is not being used to compress the spring so it is available to drive the car.

Energy is all around and in different forms free for the taking after the expense from making something to capture it. Think about all the mills that captured the energy from falling water in rivers and streams or rivers.

Storing power for later use has always been a problem ( think batteries)and the energy stored in a spring is a good concept for storing energy.

Posted 2009-03-20T22:47:10Z

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Obwon

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Have a look at:

http://tribes.tribe.net/humanpoweredeverything

Where you can get some more ideas and add your own.

Posted 2009-11-02T17:22:25Z

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MikeBuilder123

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If you think Obama's system is working, ask someone who isn't!

Note that laws of conservation of energy laws prevail on spring loaded devices.

Note also that springs only return .667 of the energy that was used to tighten them. That is why springs give out long before any other component in an energetic system.

The lost energy is in the form of heat: when you twist metal, it heats . . . remember?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookes_law

Posted 2009-11-05T01:56:13Z

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