What is the purpose of a gyroscope on a boat and how does it work?
In: Engineering
There are, depending on the boat, several purposes for gyroscopes on that boat. You may find this answer too vague for your liking, but if you could be more specific then so could I.
A gyroscope is a fast-spinning wheel. Because it is spinning so fast, it is difficult to change the orientation of this wheel – it tends to keep spinning in the same direction for the same reason that a car will mostly tend to keep moving once it gets going.
This tendency to keep pointing in the same direction makes gyroscopes useful for anything that requires that. It can be for tracking direction in navigation, finding true north on our rotating planet, or even keeping a surface stable on a swaying ship.
It depends. A gyroscope is a device that can detect turning. In the past, we used spinning mass gyros which is exactly what it sounds like. You had a metal wheel that spun at extremely high speeds. When the boat turns, pitches, or rolls, a force is exerted perpendicular to the axis the gyro is spinning on. A scale measures the force and a computer turns that measurement into a rate of turn.
With this information, you can plug it into a navigation computer to determine your location without GPS, or you can use it in a stabilization system where you can reduce the effects of the waves on the boat.
Modern systems no longer use spinning mass gyros, they either use MEMS, the same type of accelerometers your phone uses to determine it’s orientation, or fiber optic/ring laser gyros.
So I’ll talk about the big boats, aka cruise ships. On a small scale gyroscopes can be used to level something. So think about being at sea in rough waters. Playing pool is going to be super difficult. [Not anymore!](https://youtu.be/N-aE5oszXyQ) The gyroscope keeps the pool table level. Mostly what it’s doing is looking for changes in the table’s orientation and then using motors to compensate.
Now wouldn’t it be better if the boat didn’t rock to begin with? We can apply similar principals to a gyroscope detecting changes in orientation, feeding that into software, and then deploying some sort of compensation to minimize the change. In this case there are two large underwater wings on the back half of the ship. You can see an explanation near the end of [this video](https://youtu.be/A2QfV11XYD8).
If you’re interested in smaller boats, here’s an outfit that makes a much smaller model: https://www.seakeeper.com/technology/ In this case the gyroscope is being moved opposite the tilt of the boat to balance it out.
do you mean a gyro-compass? it points to geographic north. as for how it works…
the earth rotates from west to east. if you let it move freely, a gyroscope will remain in its orientation due to its rotational inertia. to someone standing next to the gyroscope, this would look like the gyroscope was rotating very slowly, once per day.
when you push on a gyroscope, you cause it to undergo *precession* and point itself perpendicular (at a right angle) to the force applied. by attaching a carefully balanced weight to the gyroscope, gravity will apply a torque to the compass (toward the center of the earth) which will nudge the gyroscope to align itself north/south.
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