hovering platform

compress air machine.

A hover craft type or an inverse suction bed.

What about suspending it from cables under servo motor control?

You have to supply more detail about your application, need, restrictions, accuracy etc.

It will be used to lift a platform and a person of the ground 5cm. It has to be able to travel at high speeds.

Can we ask why?...in case there is a simple alternative like a block of foam rubber or 4 house bricks?

The pressure required to lift your load is about 10" WC. A leaf blower should do the job with proper skirting of the platform edge.

Dear Ace, Can you explain more about your results?, maybe indicating wich formula was used to find that 10" WC is the required pressure..

It is the weight of the load divided by the area of the platform.

Ace, you are assuming too much knowledge. The OP may never have had physics!

Here is a bit more detail for him:

80 kg / (30cmX100cm) = 80/3000 kg/cm²= 0.0267 kg/cm² =26.7 g/cm²

Since water has a mass of 1 g/cm³, a 1 cm² column of water 26.7 cm high will exert the same pressure. 26.7 cm is about 10.5 inches; your air source must exert that much pressure to barely lift off the ground, and significantly more to reach 5 cm off the ground.

There are lawn mowers that cut without anything touching the ground. I saw and ran one in Sweden back in '03.

The lawn mower was manufactured andsold in the US as a Fly Mow. Had one in the shop for a while and it did cut and hover. not too good on a steep hill. worked great on level ground.

5 cm?!

YOU WILL NEED a Hot air baloon

Or a Helicopter

Or a tornado--if you get one on call

This could be a good starting point:

http://www.designnews.com/article/CA414124.html

Why certainly. Isn't that where the OP came from?
Or merely a coincidence? ? ?

If he did, he would not have to ask the questions he did.

I fantasized building a larger one with solar panels and power regenative braking wheels when hovering lower to stop.

"If he did, he would not have to ask the questions he did." Or he wanted publicity.

As to power you could use some of the "Solid State Heat Engines ? ?" listed in Mechanical Engineering forum.

Sounds like a cool project!

The hardest part for me would be to fit in the workable weight, I am rather big bonned...

Equipped with inertial sensors and GPS, it could become quite stable and safe to use.

Also the wheels should be a blessing on slopes, if you can imagine air surfers darting down the hills of San Francisco without them.

Connect platform with high pressure and volume pneumatic hose and distribute it on the platform with around 8 discharge hoses may be you can get lifted 5 cm or more.

Without a reasonable amount of info as to what you are going to do, I feel that we cannot help you much further.

Particularly the mentioning of "high speed", without actually naming the speed shows that you probably have no idea as to how to describe your requirement(s).

If you cannot do that, then how can we help? Crystal Ball? Then go and buy yourself one asap!!

Sorry, I meant to say about 20km/h.

Lots of high school physics classes have made such devices using gas or electric leaf blowers. They do work to 'float' a person, but the ones I've seen required considerable skill on the part of the operator to start, stop, and steer (shifting weight around). They had more like 1 or 2cm clearance, which of course means they would work only on nearly level terrain. 20km/hr is very slow for a car, but with a base that small, if you hit a pebble or stick, you are going to go tumbling... Be sure you wear a helmet and long sleeves!

yes, go to www.rescueescape.com and if you are still interested send me an e mail to jumangui@caribe.net

This is WAY cool!

May be hard to prevent people from using it daily.

I am with Giga!

I bet you could make more money if you turned this into a amusement park ride!

I would pay 10 bucks to ride it! hahah!

Seriously though. Cool idea and a noble cause!

bill12780

Thanks Giga, thanks Bill,

Yes, one of its uses will be an amusement park ride where going down a transparent tube as shown in www.rescueescape.com: first, a baby girl could fantasize about the ride seeing a film with colored ponies and nice fragrances simulating to be sitting on a cloud, while afterwards, her brother, tuffy kid 8 year old Jeff could request ( on the same tube), a "Terminator" ride with a gun powder scent and battle like noises, while being pushed up and down by a fake turbulent air current similating a fire explosion before finally landing.

Yes, after you see www.rescuescape.com one thinks this is a posibility. To prevent people from using it as a fast way down from the building, the system will have some type of a lock, controlled by one of the instructors, similar to when you are on a cruise ship, where you can bypass an officer if you have the key and lower down the lifesaving boats!!! There are limit switches in the system that will alert through a siren that this action is taking effect.

Have you ever seen wind tunel?

Do you mean a free fall simulator?

Yes, as Giga also points out a free fall simulator at a vertical wind tunnel.

For the purpose of the hovering plataform one would have to create a vertical force attached to the upper part of your hoovering system and therefore it would increase the weight of the hoover system to be "hovered". Not nice.

If the hoovering plataform investigated in this forum is stationary it would be possible to have a 1/4" thick steel plate (36" x 40") placed slightly higher than a second flat surface attached to it by using 3 or 4 equal length chains between these two, so that when a bottom air entrance at the center of the surface is injected with air it would hoover alright.

On the other hand, as for mi invention, the air pressure is created by the falling body and there is no exterior mecanical or electric system controlling the fall and the exactness of the air that passes and is controlled, is crutial since the system works with drastic acelerations and decelerations. If the building is high, you may want to increase the speed from 30 mph to 60 mph if the distance is large. If the distance is short there is no need to go to higher speeds when being lowered. Do remember this is an escape device for buildings that may be 40 feet or 170 stories high, yes, over 2,000 feet high. ( see www.rescueescape.com, click at the center figure.)

Good technical info and links with video samples at

http://www.amasci.com/amateur/hovercft.html