So he gradually increases the energy transfer from the weight to the arm over the course of the drop. But that arm swinging around must have a lot of energy loss due to friction and air resistance.
This loss will rise exponentially with the speed increase right? So in a sense he is holding his energy budget in a very inefficient phase, with high losses.
Two things support this. A) he spent a lot of time trying to make the arm more arodynamic. B) The spool widening at the end, which is essentially changing back down gears, applying more torque, right at the end when you want speed.
An alternative would be to drop the weight, and let it fall unrestricted until it gets to it's highest speed (this would minimise friction and air resistance) and only at the end of its fall, transfer the energy into the arm.
In this case the arm would only need to rotate 180 degrees or whatever, and not waste energy rotating right?
And then, to take this a step further to make this work there would need to be some flexibility or elasticity in the system to take energy from the high speed falling weight to the arm.
And what you have ended up with is something that looks like.... A whip!
I think your assessment is correct about the energy losses. I'm just not sure about the fix.
If you want to accelerate a weight quickly in a single swipe, (simplified) gradually reducing the mass along the length of the whip imparts more kenetic energy at the end (the whip crack).
So the arm would no longer be rigid, although you can see in the OPs video it isn't actually fully rigid.
Not saying its impossible to create a successful system like that, in fact it sounds sort of a natural/organic design that potential could be closer to the optimal design, but it would be more difficult to accomplish and probably need more testing and design iterations. So I think OPs strategy is more simple and pragmatic in this case.
You're going to transfer the energy quickly, you'll just break any "arm" that's light enough to accelerate with the energy available.
You could maybe use an 'already broken' arm (rope, like a whip) but then it's not a trebuchet.
He has some great videos. I watched this one and was impressed at the calculations, the transparency and the celebration at the end when he reached supersonic speeds.
The domain of ML-driven design optimization isn't exactly new, is quite specific, and I would need convincing that Claude has anything to contribute to it.
It’s not a problem of the ML model. It’s a problem of the human setting up the description of the problem in such a way that the model can operate. OpenSCAD gets a long way towards that target. Use it with a model thats been trained for the purpose - just the same way that ML has been used to produce optimal rocket engine nozzles and fuel transfer systems.
Not that difficult, really.
> Claude has been trained on high school physics textbooks, yo
The very fact that physics textbooks have little bearing in the real world is the whole damn reason why Mechanical Engineering exists as a separate discipline, yo
> It’s a problem of the human setting up the description of the problem in such a way that the model can operate.
It's a problem of defining the initial state (which is the trivial part that OpenSCAD may be a contributing element of), defining constraints and variables (what is allowed to be changed and not, for what can, in which ways, to what extent, i.e. what is the library of allowed material, fastening, machining, assembling techniques available to your very specific situation), defining evaluation and fitting criteria.
I see very little adequacy of general purpose LLMs in that
> the same way that ML has been used to produce optimal rocket engine nozzles and fuel transfer systems.
Which has nothing to do with "just use Claude, yo"
Other trebuchet fans who dream of building one some day may be interested in googling "walking trebuchet" for a surprisingly high complexity/results ratio.
Just for the fun of it. Pure whimsy.
I would think you want it decreasing to near zero to extract all the kinetic energy from the mass, leaving the mass stationary as it hits the ground.
- structural: There are height and size limits on things you can build without a permit
- trespassing: flinging objects onto others people property is illegal
- endangerment: any activity that can endanger other people is illegal
All of these three depend on how rural you live I guess. So in a suburban neighborhood I would assume they get involved very quickly.
But seriously, it's one of those things we had preciously little of before online video became a thing.