LDZ trebuchet - quite sure a trebuchet with the highest range efficiency!
Hello! This is my first post on this blog. I would like to present the LDZ trebuchet - a mechanical device which I was working on as a part of my master degree thesis in mechanical engineering supervised by professor Przemysław Perlikowski at Lodz University of Technology. Trebuchets are medieval siege engines which feature high range efficiency. That quantity tells us how well the input energy is transferred to output range of the projectile. I computed that an optimized variant of such a machine from the Middle Ages gets 73% of range efficiency (friction excluded). Nowadays we have many modern concepts of trebuchet which perform better in this field - e.g.: Floating Arm Trebuchet, Multiple Rotation Trebuchet, Trebuchet On Wheels - but we cannot expect from them a score close to 100% (which is upper limit for the range efficiency not breaking the laws of physics). Given this situation, I designed a new machine which I called "LDZ" and made a mathematical model for it in Ma...