Paddlewheel-style wind cart with fairing

This is the simplest to understand downwind cart that I could think of that has a shot at exceeding the wind speed. It works rather similarly to coolaun's "across the paper faster than the paper" cotton spool: force is applied to the bottom half of the cart, where the paddles are moving more slowly than the cart as a whole.

The cart has two parts: the spinning paddlewheel and the non-spinning fairing that covers the top half of the spinning wheel. There are no gears; the little wheels you can see in the video serve as ball bearings to help the fairing ride smoothly on top. If the cart is moving at exactly the wind speed, can you see that the lower half of the paddlewheel is presenting a slower-moving surface to the wind than the fairing is?

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• DDWFTTW
• DWFTTW
• downwind
• wind
• cart

[MrMcDugan]

It looks pretty windy out...

[cambigfoot88]

cool