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What is a Fly wheel?
A flywheel is a mechanical device with a significant moment of inertia used as a storage device for rotational energy. Flywheels resist changes in their rotational speed, which helps steady the rotation of the shaft when a fluctuating torque is exerted on it by its power source such as a piston-based (reciprocating) engine, or when the load placed on it is intermittent (such as a piston pump).
Flywheels can be used to produce very high power pulses as needed for some experiments, where drawing the power from the public network would produce unacceptable spikes. A small motor can accelerate the flywheel between the pulses. Recently, flywheels have become the subject of extensive research as power storage devices for uses in vehicles; see flywheel energy storage.
Applications
In the application of flywheels in vehicles, the phenomenon of precession has to be considered. A rotating flywheel responds to any momentum that tends to change the direction of its axis of rotation by a resulting precession rotation. A vehicle with a vertical-axis flywheel would experience a lateral momentum when passing the top of a hill or the bottom of a valley (roll momentum in response to a pitch change).
Two counter-rotating flywheels may be needed to eliminate this effect. The flywheel has been used since ancient times, the most common traditional example being the potter’s wheel. In the Industrial Revolution, James Watt contributed to the development of the flywheel in the steam engine, and his contemporary James Pickard used a flywheel combined with a crank to transform reciprocating into rotary motion. In a more modern application, a momentum wheel is a type of flywheel useful in satellite pointing operations, in which the flywheels are used to point the satellite’s instruments in the correct directions without the use of thrusters rockets. Flywheels are used in punching machines and riveting machines, where they store energy from the motor and release it during the operation cycle (punching and riveting).
History
The principle of the flywheel is already found in the Neolithic spindle and the potter’s wheel. The flywheel as a general mechanical device for equalizing the speed of rotation is first described in the Kitab al-Filaha of the Andalusian engineer Ibn Bassal, who applies the device in a chain pump (saqiya) and noria. According to the American medievalist Lynn Townsend White, Jr., such a flywheel is also recorded in the De diversibus artibus (On various arts) of the German artisan Theophilus Presbyter, who records applying the device in several of his machines.
How a flywheel works
The flywheel works in a similar way to the wheel in the toy cars you used to rev up and release and let it zoom off. The heavy wheel located between the engine and the gearbox builds up rotational force with speed and momentum. Effectively storing the energy and helping the car resist changes in engine speed – good for cruising at a steady speed but bad when you need a fast engine response. Drawbacks – it takes effort to get the wheel rotating and stops the engines revs increasing or slowing down quickly.A lighter wheel takes strain off the engine and allows the engine to rev more freely, as a bonus as there is less weight the engine is able to release more power. You’ll notice a race-tuned engine increases and decreases revs a lot more quickly than a standard engine. The big downside to a lighter flywheel is that engine momentum or inertial spin is reduced – most noticeably on a hill. Whereas the momentum in the engine is maintained with a heavy flywheel the momentum is reduced and the hill has a much more direct effect on the engine output.
Best used in a race situation where the track is flat with a demand for fast engine speed changes and the engine has been tuned to output power matching the flywheel capacity (high revving). The driver will often heel and toe gear change and braking taking advantage of the greater responsiveness from the engine. Various weight of flywheel are available allowing you to get the best torque/free revving capabilities. Different grades of flywheel are available for different situations have a chat with our members in the Torque cars forum to discuss your required application. If you feel tempted to make your own light weight flywheel by drilling holes in it torque cars urge you to reconsider. Even standard flywheels that are put into cars are balanced. A wobble in the flywheel can have disastrous consequences on the engine and will reduce your red line significantly. A fly wheel that breaks will send a buzz saw of metal through the car potentially causing injury to driver and passenger.
Flywheels as a Solution
The solution is achieved by keeping the vehicle’s energy in the same form as when the vehicle starts braking, and the form it must inevitably be in when the vehicle is back up to speed. In other words, less conversion equals less energy lost. This requires the use of high-speed flywheels, popular in space and in uninterruptible power supplies for computer systems, etc., but novel in cars. High-speed flywheel energy storage is essentially a substitute for a battery system, in which the inputs and outputs are required to be electrical currents. For the space and computer applications, using high-speed motor/generators to add and remove energy from the flywheels makes sense. The use of flywheel technology is well known. However, in ground vehicles it makes more sense to use mechanical, geared systems, which are much more efficient. For example, a typical conventional manual transmission is at least 97% efficient over most of its power and speed range. Of course, a mechanical solution to gearing a flywheel operating between, say, ten and twenty thousand rpm geared to road wheels operating at up to 2,000 rpm is much more complex, requiring a totally smooth continuously variable ratio transmission capable of ‘dictating’ whether the vehicle is accelerating or braking. Among other differences, the bearings must be optimized to deal with road shocks, rather than designed to minimize frictional losses, the priority for static or space borne battery substitutes.
While the principles of using high-speed flywheels are similar in most applications, there are several other critical differences between battery substitutes and vehicle-mounted SPUs. In general, a mechanically driven flywheel system has losses due to bearing friction, windage, etc, which will make it less efficient than a battery-based system in storing energy for more than an hour or so. However, over the much shorter periods required in cut-and-thrust traffic, a mechanically driven flywheel proves much more effective. Consequently, the ideal combination in a plug-in hybrid is a flywheel as the SPU, plus a battery optimized to store the plug-in electricity as efficiently as possible.
The flywheel SPU then completely protects the battery from the shock loads of acceleration and braking, ensuring maximum battery life, and allowing optimally efficient discharge. Almost every vehicle with a manual transmission is already fitted with a flywheel to smooth the flow of power from the engine and to provide a small store of energy to help prevent stalling on launch. Millions of toy cars are made each year which use a small flywheel geared up to spin fast enough to provide spectacular scale performance, to the delight of millions of small children, and quite a few adults too.
Engineers are now taking the geared high-speed flywheel concept and applying it to full-sized cars, trucks and buses. The prize is an SPU efficiency of at least 60%, with the possibility of 80% or more with further development. The result is a further dramatic improvement in fuel economy, at lower cost, without sacrificing acceleration.
