Convert truck trailers into industrial machines that use friction from braking on long stretches of downhill roads to mill wheat
Image credit: Jetta Productions, Getty Images
Darko SavicJul 13, 2022
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Downhill wheat milling or cooking using friction from braking on long stretches of downhill roads. Truck trailers converted into industrial mills or ovens.
Take a full trailer of wheat uphill and return with flour.
Why?
Industrial machines use a lot of power. This is one of the factors that increase humanity's total power demand and present a hurdle to powering society solely from renewable sources.
In suitable locations, this could provide cities with daily demands of cooked rice or flour.
How it works
In suitable locations with long stretches of downhill roads convert truck trailers into industrial machines that use friction from braking to power the milling or heating of the cargo. On the way down the truck would not use normal brakes at all. Instead, the trailer wheels would be connected with gears to power the machine inside. The gears would be designed for the specific road so that both the vehicle speed and the machine inside the trailer are rotating at optimal speeds. For the machine inside to operate at ideal rotation per minute the truck would travel downhill at the legal speed limit.
Additional downhill weight
When going downhill, there could be additional (passerby) trucks linked behind the trailer. The entire composition would then rely on the trailer-machine for braking. That would increase the work potential for the trailer-machine while saving the other trucks' brakes.
Some examples of suitable roads
117 km (72 miles) in Peru between Concocha and Paramonga. The starting point is at 4095 m (13440 ft) altitude, and the end is at 16 m (52 ft).
40 km (24.8 miles) the longest and highest paved road in Europe is the Pico Veleta.
38 km (24 miles) Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii.
and so on
Other use case scenarios
industrial food processing - cooking anything on the heat created by friction
charging batteries
Water heating. An empty tanker goes uphill. There it's filled with water. The water gets heated on the way down. At the destination it gets added into the communal pools, or tanks of centrally heated buildings, neighborhoods, etc. Then the truck goes back uphill, empty.
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General comments
Povilas S2 years ago
I like the idea, but I'm not sure if this would be worth it in practice. Wouldn't the braking energy harvested for milling/heating compromise the stopping of the truck? Also, for this to be worth it, the following conditions have to be met - the suitable downhill road has to be on the way between cargo loading and the delivery point (not to make the truck intentionally go off its way just to mill the grains), also, the client at the destination should desire the delivered plant material milled/cooked.
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Darko Savic2 years ago
A company producing something that needs truckloads of flour, or a company that has its own brand of flour on the supermarket shelves could use something like this even if it means hauling a full load uphill and returning with it back to the same town. Take a full trailer of wheat uphill and return with flour.
An average Asian town uses tons of cooked rice per day. The restaurants pre-cook loads of it in the morning and then use it as an ingredient in everything they cook throughout the day. So a truck with cooked rice could make the rounds in the morning. Or it could be re-packed into returnable containers first and delivered to every restaurant by vans.
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Povilas S2 years ago
Darko Savic Driving the truck uphill and returning it to the town just to mill the grains doesn't seem economic at all. Mills are way better for this. A truck needs energy (now still mostly fossil fuel) to move and it also needs to use some of the braking energy for stopping, not to bump into something. So the milling from excess braking energy would just be a byproduct of the truck's movement.
Mills and cooking gear focus the energy entirely to shred/heat the material inside, while trucks use the energy primarily for moving their parts.
That's why it seems that your proposed system could only be effective in situations where the delivery between places is needed anyway.
The situation you describe in the second paragraph seems more like it.
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Darko Savic2 years ago
Povilas S on the way down the truck can be daisy-chained with other random trucks that happen to go downhill. That would make the trailer mill more profitable than a stationary mill
Darko Savic Jul 13, 2022
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