Sustainable Rope-Lift System for Playgrounds

This documents the process of designing a new way of generating energy at a playground. I looked into current playground designs and found out that the fireman's pole is quite popular among children but it can cause injuries easily as they are mainly made of metal and gets very hot when in the sun. There are also no safety measures to prevent children from falling from a high platform. This design solves these problems and is a new solution for playgrounds.

This concept uses the gravitational potential energy from the children going down the pole. They sit on a platform and it winds down the axle. This turning force is then transferred to a large gear which is connected to a smaller gear to change the gear ratio and then is connected to a coil. When the child leaves the system the elasticity of the wind-down mechanism winds the rope and seat up which creates a reciprocating motion of the gear. It is transmitted into AC for the generator.

As this was only a conceptual design I used Fusion 360 as the CAD software.

Firstly I made the individual components of the system. I used joints to align them and to make an animation of how it works.

I added textures and materials to make it look realistic. I also made a GIF to showcase the system in action on how it generates AC.

This is the final design! It only is made of internal components as it can be connected to the grid or other playground components. Hope you liked this concept :D