THE SWINGING-CYLINDER GYRO-PISTON ENGINE

DESCRIPTION Consider an automobile engine's piston cylinder. Consider one of these extended to about 3 feet in length, sitting flat in front of you with the cylinder axis horizontal. The piston is replaced by a heavy, high speed, motor driven cylindrical gyroscope of the same shape and size, which rotates on the central axis of the main hollow cylinder.

This gyroscope is now rammed hard, up and down the length of the cylinder at, say 5 to 10 cycles per second, rather like the piston in a car engine. A linear electric motor might be appropriate for driving the "gyro-piston" up and down the cylinder.

Now we swing the cylinder. We mount the whole cylinder on a strong vertical shaft, which swings back and forth on it's own vertical axis. The cylinder might swing over an angle of plus and minus 45 degrees or more.

Now the Key point. The swing is made to be at the same frequency as the piston cycle, and synchronous with it. Moreover we choose the phase, or timing of the swing cycle with respect to the piston cycle.

The idea is that the end point of each piston cycle is timed to be coincident with the end point of each swing cycle. If the theory is right we get a pulse of lifting force around the time of the end point of each cycle. The direction of this force will be the same at either end of the cycle.

Rather as an automobile engine may use 4 cylinders, a practical implementation of this device would use several such cylinder units, operating in sequence with timing offsets with respect to each other. The idea of this is to produce a comparitively constant force from the sum of many regularly spaced pulses. To adequately smooth the force with a modest number of cylinder units an additional form of smoothing would be needed. Large strong springs, like automobile suspension springs, might suffice for this. The springs would hold each cylinder unit from above and below, within a rigid lifting framework.