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Flywheel Energy Storage: Steel Yourself For Carbon
Red Leader. writes: "Hey. Here's an interesting article on flywheels and the future of batteries from Wired Magazine (8.05).
Nothing super-promising yet (as always; vapourware) -- but down the road, these could make your laptop 'spin' a little longer." I'm a big fan of simple machines, and flywheels are one of my favorites. The mention of carbon nanotubes is especially interesting -- it'd be neat to see that technology enter the mainstream.
I'm just a computer scientist so this explanation is bound to have some bugs. I think the magnetic bearing play two roles here. 1. One is to keep the cylinder suspended. Less physical friction, the better. 2. The magnets may also be used to rotate the cylinder itself. If you've ever broken apart electric motors (at least the ones that were in small race cars I destroyed as a kid), the magnet doesn't completely envelop the cylinder. The cylinder has a charge opposite of what the outer magnet has. The opposite charge rotates the cylinder a little bit. Normally the cylinder wouln't keep turing because before completing a circle, the opposite ends of the magnets would meet again which would basically keep our magnatized cylinder stationary. However, just before the opposite ends of the magnet meet for the second time, demagnatize the cylinder and let it rotate (momentum, inirtia, I forget which one). Just as soon as the ends pass, re-magnatize the cylinder--the ends push off each other again--continue! At least in the motoros of my broken toys, the cylinder was magnatized through wrapping a fairly large amount of copper wire around it and connecting it to a battery. Just make the cylinder so as it rotates, it makes then breaks the wire-battery circuit at just the right moments. Despite my explanation, it is actually a fairly simple process (as far as I can tell).
::but if you were to jump up in the air, you would find the station would spin out from under your feet, and you would not land in the same place you jumped from:: Try doing so on a train. you have the same forward momentium as the train. If the station were to STOP you'd fly into something.
Lowmag.net
Anyone thought of building a huge flywheel on the equator with the axis pointed toward the center of the earth? The rotation of the earth would rotate the axis of the flywheel and cause it to accelerate (ignoring inefficiencies) How efficient would a flywheel have to be for this to be break even (probably very)?
Paired flywheels might balance out the precessional forces under normal conditions. (Though slopes of up to %26 occur in my city, and slopes in excess of %15 are very, very common.) But paired flywheels would actually have more failure modes to account for.
It seems to me that any flywheel in a vehicle would have to be engineered to safely return to a zero energy state under any and all conditions. I cannot imagine how that could be done.
This would be a great feature. Think about it, If you bumped it, you could have only a few inches left on the table but because it wouldn't want to flip over, it'd stay on the table...
Guys - think of it like the integrators used by Vannevar Bush in his Differential Analyzer built at MIT - you can see them in the third picture down. Now, these used a metal knife edge wheel turning a larger glass disk (set perpendicular to the knife edge wheel) to perform integration. The knife edge wheel could move radially in and out on it's shaft, varying the speed at which the glass disk turned (I think the knife edge wheel turned the glass disk - but it may have been the other way around, what with the torque amplifiers used on the shaft of the knife edge wheel - anyone know for sure?). To envision the flywheel system being imagined:
Replace the glass disk with the flywheel, and the knife edge wheel with a motor driven rubber wheel - allow it to move in/out via some mechanism (no need to move the motor, allow the motor to remain stationary, and move the rubber drive wheel along the shaft, radially to the center of the wheel).
That should make it clearer...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Counterrevolving pairs of flywheels don't work well as a substitute for good gimbaling. The reason is that, while the *external* forces are nulled out by the counterrevolving aspect, the *internal* forces remain every bit as huge. Because there's no force feedback to the outside, it becomes VERY EASY to trash the main bearings: even a very slight, effortless rotation of the main case causes incredible, huge (opposing) torques to develop in the two main bearings -- which then stop working (crash, boom, tinkle).
The way I read it putting them in a vacuum is't common practice, although I may very well be wrong on that. Still, how do you get a vacuum chamber w/ magnets & a spinning disk that has enough mass into something less than an inch thick?
Gyroscopic effects can be neutralized simply by running two identical flywheels in opposite directions.
Actually, the hopefully soon to be launched Phase3D Amateur Radio satellite uses 3 flywheel like devices (they call them reaction or momentum wheels) to allow the satellite to stay oriented properly in 3d space.r .html
Check out http://www.amsat.org/ and
http://myweb.magicnet.net/~phase3d/newpics/sola
(They've got lots of good technical info on how they solved lots of the technical aspects of keeping a satellite up... Even heat dissapation is complicated without air.)
Actually, with the flywheel, you can simply power things through the flywheel, as opposed to 'switching'. (same as UPS theory). Especially given the theoretical longevity of the flywheel. Power the huge underground flywheel, and the flywheel powers your city. Feed power to flywheel disappears, flywheel keeps going until it expends all it's stored energy.
Just thought I'd elaborate on the previous reply to this post. I'm good friends with one of the engineers working on the flywheel bus project at CEM, so I've gotten to check out a lot of their work. If you think about it, the average vehicle remains almost completely level all the time. Even fairly steep hills are generally less than 5 degrees (a 6% grade, which is quite a lot, is only 3.43 degrees). The gimbals upon which the flywheels are mounted allow 10-15 degrees travel from the verticle axis. The flywheels are, or course, mounted so that the axis of rotation is verticle, allowing the bus to turn without any problem. The system to return the flywheel to vertical is gravity-based, with the mounting point of the flywheel battery within the gimbal placed slightly above the flywheels center of gravity. Being an electrical engineer, I find the mounting and mechanical aspects of the design interesting, but the electronics required for the complete system are even more ponderous. Precise, simultaneous control of six three-phase motor/generators is required: four traction motors mounted directly to the bus wheels, which also act as regenerative brakes; the flywheel battery motor/generator; and the generator attached to the diesel motor. In addition, this control system must also set the throttle angle of the diesel motor based on the current energy demands of the bus and flywheel system, etc. It's quite a piece of work, but I'm looking forward to seeing it all in action out on the city streets here. Hopefully we'll all be buying cars with flywheel batteries and fuel cells in the not-too-distant future as well. phil
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
furthermore, immediately after the non-ideal impact of a bullet, the energy dissipates as a variety of things (heat, kinetic, sound, etc) but the momentum is strictly conserved.
as far as the relativistic effects you describe (which would not really impact our flywheel), my memory of that stuff is much more fuzzy, but momentum remains different from energy.
In a well-designed system, the manetic bearings will not be affected by the motor/generator. The respective magnetic circuits can be well-isolated from one another.
How they measure rotor position for feedback to the magnetic bearings.
Rotor position can be measured in a number of ways, including capacitive, inductive and (probably) optical sensors (although this one would make me nervous). If you're really clever, you can combine an inductive sensor with the force coils for the mag-bearings and save yourself a set of coils, but this is tricky. Practical systems can measure rotor displacement (known in the field as 'runout') to a fraction of a mil (1/1000").
If it's a motor/generator, there must be a rotating magnet. Is it intregated with the flywheel, or attached to the side, or what?
There need not be a permanent magnet in a motor/generator... see induction motor, synchronous reluctance motor, etc. In fact, there are compelling reasons NOT to include rotating permanent magnets in a flywheel, such as elimination of parasitic losses due to eddy currents in motor/generator windings. However, some systems do incorporate permanent magnets.
- j
PS: These things are EXTREMELY tough in practice to make work... there are engineering challeges in many different disciplines that need to be solved simultaneously, which is probably why no one has gotten one to work reliably and economically yet (despite the conceptual simplicity).
I've long loved the idea of flywheel cars but have always worried about the gyroscopic effects.
Consider a car with a flywheel in it. If the flywheel lies in the horizontal plane, its axis of rotation (and, thus, its moment of inertia) is vertical. If such a car were to turn on a flat road, nothing would happen. But if this car were to drive onto a ramp, the flywheel acts like a gyroscope and would cause the car to violently turn to the left or right.
Likewise, if the flywheel is oriented so that the axis is horizontal, any turn to the left or right would cause the car's nose or rear to pluge into the ground. The exact direction would depend on the direction of rotation.
What am I missing in this account? Am I simply wrong to think that the precessional force would be so strong? I haven't checked any numbers for myself, so it could be that the effect is sufficiently weak. Indeed, the bus that was described in the article didn't seem to flip over. Of course, it was just using the flywheels as temporary storage for acceleration in combination with hybrid power (right?). So perhaps its flywheels are smaller than the ones I'm envisioning as replacements for the batteries in modern purely electric cars.
The solution that I see is to place two counter-rotating flywheels right next to each other so that the total moment of inertia is zero. There would be tremendous stresses on the support structure for the flywheels, but the sum moment of inertia is zero.
Tom Kornack
To increase the amount stored, you can make the wheel heavier, or spin it faster.
Seems to me that there's only three ways to power a laptop w/ a flywheel:
Even with a Crusoe chip I don't see this being practical.
Actually, I'm most intesteted in a clockworks-driven laptop power supply. I've seen spring powered flashlights - it seems silly, but consider how useful one would be during a prolonged power outage. No batteries needed. A wind-up laptop would be a wonderful thing...crank that sucker!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Now THAT is funny as hell.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
The advent of the water dam and the diversion of water for irrigration purposes has shifted water toward the poles of the earth. Just as a figure skater brings in her arms to spin faster, our planet would spin faster if the moment of inertia is decreased in this way. Someone has claimed to actually calculate this effect. It was an article on the back of the main section of the New York Times a few years back.
Tom Kornack
How do you heat one of these cars? The same way Volkswagen did it in the original Bug, with a gas heater.
It's a trivial issue.
I've been pretty satisfied by what I've seen of flywheel safety enclosures, so that's not too much of a worry. Precession is only a problem for a flywheel when off-center torque is applied. Proper mounting of the fly-wheel and proper design of the control system for the magnetic bearings take care of this problem and negate the need for a second flywheel. As for heat problems, mounting in a vacuum and using magnetic bearings certainly help to cut down on friction-generated heat, which is very important (of course, these are necessary to get acceptable efficiency out of the system anyway), but they create problems of their own. If you think about it for a second, you'll realize that the flywheel and rotor comprise a system which, during normal operation, touches nothing and is surrounded by a vacuum. It's still going to get hot, though, because of the induced current in the rotor windings. Where does this heat go? There's no convection or conduction, so the only cooling path is through direct radiation, which is very inefficient. High efficiency motors and electrical noise reduction become VERY important in flywheel design for this reason. phil.
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
Carbon nanotubes could be the energy source of the future. Not only are they useful for flywheels as the article mentions but they also are being tapped for use in hydrogen fuel cells. The nanotubes can trap hydrogen and make it safe for storage and use as fuel. The nanotubes need to be able to carry 6.5% of their weight in hydrogen. Some researchers have claimed that they have formulated nanotubes which can hold up to 65% of their weight in hydrogen but those results have not been revealed because of "commercial reasons." (Don't these people ever learn? You're not going to make a cent unless your process stands up to scientific review!) Still, carbon nanotubes are an exciting new prospect in the quest for a cleaner burning engine system. Between hydrogen fuel cells and flywheel power, the prospects of these structures are enormous.
For the outside, yes. But for the bearings these wheels run in, the forces would be quite real. So even if you don't feel it on the outside, the bearings and mounting frames that hold the 2 wheels will have to be able to take the highest possible forces plus a safety margin. You do not want a full powered flywheel to break loose, you really do not want this to happen...
Just think... with a hydro-pneumatic, 120% capacity cold fusion perpetual motion flywheel array in my laptop...
Quake 3 would FLY!!!!!
Charles Sheffield, One man's universe, The continuing chronicles of Arthur Morthon McAndrew.
Really hard Sci-Fi. Weird stuff. Although the literary quality is nowhere near, say a Iain Banks or Gibson, the Sci part of it is impressive.
Does anyone know about more Sci-Fi novels written by this man?
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
Does anyone remember "Shipstones" from Heinlein's books? They were a super-efficient non-lossy energy storage unit, which were so sophisticated in design that the inventor didn't even bother to get a patent, because (supposedly) they were almost impossible to reverse-engineer.
Heh; well, you can't be right about everything, I guess...
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I am having a hard time deciding which is cooler, flywheels or thermophotovoltaic generators. I guess I will just have to hope for a tpv/flywheel electric hybrid car to be made. That would seriously kick ass.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
One other thing... I'll be really impressed if they manage to make the same spinning disk do double-duty as both hard drive platter and flywheel.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Pardon the silly title.
yes, even the smallest flywheel has gyroscopic precession problems. Yes there is a danger that they might shatter and shoot out lots of nasty fragments. Then again, your typical battery can spontaneously burst into flames, spew acid all over the place, and generally trash your surroundings at the drop of the hat. I don't see too many peole complaining about those problems.
The precession problem with flywheels can be almost completely negated by using two counter-rotating flywheels. yes, I am aware that there will be some problems with movement along the Z-axis, but this is managable in instances where there is little Z-movement (such as cars).
Furthermore, the heat problem is significantly reduces (in fact, almost eliminated) if the flywheel is contained in a sealed vacuum shell. For safety's sake, making this shell from something like kevlar would reduce the small risk associated with flywheel failures at high speed.
The biggest problem with using flywheels is that there has to be some sort of electric motor - that is, something that can change mechanical movement to electrical energy. In items like cars and UPSes, this isn't much of a problem. In your laptop (and similar compact places) this is definately a stumbling block. I wouldn't look for flywheels in laptops anytime soon.
I expect to see flywheels in electric cars in the near future, since they offer alot of advantages over a most batteries: lighter weight, a very high energy capacity, ability to deliver large amounts of current quickly (something most non-lead-acid batteries can't do), and virtually no maintenance.
Honestly, I can't wait for the hybrid car to come along: small, constant RPM gasoline engine, electric generator, and flywheel. You have a lead-acid to start the whole thing, and store any excess energy in the flywheel. Cool!
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Motorola claimed it would be 3-5 years away from producing Methanol based fuel cells with at least twice the energy density from todays batteries. These batteries should also be safe from most of the problems associated with current technology (memory effect, fuel exchange instead of timely recharge...)
Do you realize that you basically regurgitated the article? I read the comments to maybe get some alternate opinions or insight, not the Readers Digest version posing as.
.02
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Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
I'm sorry but I just don't see the connection between Carbon Nanotubes and Flywheels.
Can someone please enlighten me...
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
I'm not much of an expert on physics so someone might want to correct me here but they're talking about using conventional motors to spin these disks up.
My question is would it be possible to introduce alternating magnetic particles (in a permanant arrangement) around a track of the disk somewhere near the centre? You could then use these to accelerate or draw power out of the disc directly. This eliminates all friction imposed on the disk and as such the only thing slowing the disk down translates to actual power output.
You could use magnets around the outside area of the disk for suspension and stabilisation and I'd assume this could simplify design somewhat.
Is there a reason why this isn't being done?
Wow -- sounds sorta like what I had been thinking of, oh maybe 7 years ago. And I was born in 1985. So hmmm... maybe I should listen to my absurd ideas a little more...
Do a sun-and-planets type gear system. I can't really remember exactly how it works, yet alone explain it without a picture, but basically what you get is the ability to control the gear ratio by (I think) a little electric motor.
You don't really need it to vary continuously, though -- some skillz with the conventional gears could accomplish the same thing with a less mechanical effort.
Finally, connect the pedals directly to the power train (oh yeah and of course you'd need to add a neutral setting) and charge up by pedaling really fast before you come out in front of everybody, and pedaling lighly as you go along. Yeah that really would be cool.
A sensible "pedal"-gear size should avoid the Darwin risk.
>Which in itself resolves a fundamental problem,
>emissions, which are a very serious problem,
>getting worse, in most countries.
Well, it doesn't really solve it, it just pushes the emission generation away from the car. You still have to generate the power somewhere, and most countries burn fossil fuels to generate their electricity (including over half the power in the US I believe). The only practical alternative to that is nuclear power, and Greenpeace et. al have pretty much put paid to any new nuclear power development.
So, while electric cars, and now flywheels, sound cool, keep in mind that the power will still be coming mostly from burning fossil fuels with all the pollution that entails.
Redhat, Debian, etc.. make profits from selling their distributions, so profits aren't all bad.
Debian does not sell their distribution; they are a nonprofit team of volunteers. If you want the distribution you either download it or buy it from cheapbytes, Corel, etc.
But if you move the energy production to a place that can do it more cleanly and efficiently (like a city power plant) and away from the internal combustion engine, then it's still a net good.
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
Acheive the same thing by rotating a nanoscale 1 miligram flywheel at 208 Million RPM.
Wee wheels win windfall -- news at eleven
Weesner
Once the wheel is in place, it is monitored and controlled remotely via a local server plugged in to the Net...
Can you say security risk? Send a killer poke to a flywheel spinning at >60,000 rev/min, and watch the carnage fly...
Of course, that's assuming they sell out and use WinCE for their flywheels... if they use an embedded Linux, then it's no problem. *grin*
J
I recalled seeing an article on Time magazine one or two years ago, mentioning the possible application of flywheels on automobiles. The point is that with a mechanical energy storage device like that, you can easily reclaim energies from, for example, speed brakes, which are normally turned into heat and dissipated into the atmosphere.
However, there are still problems that were not satisfactorily answered AFAIK. Basically flywheels work by storing energies as kinetic energies of a spinning disk. So in order to increase the amount of energy stored, either you have to increase 1) the mass of the wheel, 2) the size (diameter) of the wheel, or 3) the spinning speed of the wheel. None of which seemed desirable.
After all, the most undesirable properties of batteries are: 1) heavy, 2) bulky, 3) potentially dangerous. Just imagine what would happen if you drop such a device to the floor with an 1 Kg plate spinning at over 10K rpm... you get the idea.
Anybody have insights into this one?
listen up little girl ( you are a girl since you have no penis! ) if you knew the answer, why not just show your knowledge rather than abusing the poor ignorant soul.
since you obviously didn't know the answer:
A flywheel is a heavy wheel on a revolving shaft used to regulate machinery or accumulate power.
Sorry, but as a high school AP Chem student, I'd have to disagree with your notion that this is a possible reaction
(H20 + {N2, O2, etc} -> products + energy)
the reason being that there is very little free energy contained in the molecules of any of these abundant environmental compounds; with the exception of hydrogen- but there's not too much of that floating around close the ground on earth... it tends to react chemically, or waft off up into the stratosphere.
A fuel cell is usually based on O2 reacting with H2 (great, huh? why not get all our power that way?) (becasue there's on source for the H2; we have to electrolyse it out of water, a process that requires more energy than it yeilds) so the possibility of ambient air chemicals yeilding energy... nah- it would be happeneing in nature right now, since entropy likes stuff to fall all the way down to the lowest stable energy state.
As far as I know there's no such thing as an alternating permanent magnet, and I'm a physics undergrad who's just gone through a whole term of electromagnetism so I should know.
The only way you can get an alternating magnet is by using an inductor with a soft iron core (ie a wire wound around a soft iron core). It's called an electromagnet.
The problem with this arrangement is, of course, that it costs energy to keep on alternating the magnet from one direction to another, etc. Especially if you need to do it fast.
By the way, when they talk about "using conventional motors to spin these things" they don't mean that you tie a string to the flywheel and to the motor and start the motor and keep it running until the flywheel is spinning fast enough *grin*. I'd be very surprised if you could get 60'000 rpm out of that!!!
Daniel
Carpe Diem
The point of that being...? What? Stop the Earth in its rotation? The Coriolis effect would rip everyone off its surface. Plus it would take some axle to sustain that sort of torque... Daniel
Carpe Diem
To a certain extend, I do see your point. Alot of what I posted is indeed in the article. Next time I will try to add alot more additional info.
Perhaps I should have noted some of the interesting research being done on this:
Physical Limits of Portable Power Storage
Batteries of the 21st Century
Hybrid Electric Vehicle research
In my defense, I do think I pointed out several things that were not obvious (and people were arguing about in the preceeding posts).
I'll try for more content in the future.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Flywheel generators tend to be heavy. If you try to fit one onto your laptop - it would weight so much that it would be unpractical for portability.
I have seen this hydrogen idea on paper and in practice. When I was in Paris, at a Science exhibiton there, they had a working prototype, this was over a year ago.
This is a great idea, but its really just an extension on current petrol (gasoline) engines. It is still using the age-old internal combustion idea.
The idea behind the flywheel is revolutionary, that is, it isnt based on internal combustion engines at all. Which in itself resolves a fundamental problem, emissions, which are a very serious problem, getting worse, in most countries.
While I think that the idea for replacing petrol and using hydrogen (much simplified, I know) is great, it still has many problems associated with it. It solves the problem of eventually running out of oil, but we still have many other issues relating to emissions to consider, this is why I think that using a flywheel to power cars is great. I know it is a fair ways off, and there are still many problems to overcome, but this is the way of the future, IMHO.
...and upset he didn't ever follow though on his ideas.
This might sound like a buncha BS to some of you, but when I was in 6th grade, I remember vividly his explaining a flywheel concept to me. After reading the article, it sounds like the same thing, except my dad's plan had a huge flywheel... to generate large amounts of power. I don't know how they're mounting the motor, but my dad's concept had it mounted on a rail, and a servo system could move it toward the outer edge or toward the center. This would allow a fairly small motor (like their coffee-mug job) to spin a humongous flywheel... by starting at the extreme outer edge. As the flywheel speed comes up, the motor is moved inward, toward the center of the flywheel.
I guess it goes to show that one should never sit on a good idea, no matter how absurd-sounding it is in 1985.
(I think the problem there was that he had no idea how to initiate a patent on anything -- who do you trust to help you patent something without having your plans plain-out stolen?)
I think i'm going to go though my old 6th grade notebooks (yes, I still have some of them) and see if I can find any of his concept drawings. If nothing else, it'll make my old man feel like he knew what he was doing.
-Steve
--
*kerchunk* *beep* "...Operator."
If you put 10 kids around the outside rim of the merry-go-round and try to turn it (called "spinning up") it takes more effort to turn all that weight, but once you get it going up to speed it keeps turning longer. Another approach is to only put 5 kids on and spin it faster. Both of these methods (high weight and high speed) releases energy as it coasts.
In the case of a flywheel, the middle of the flywheel is attached to a motor that serves both as a motor (to spin up the wheel) and as a generator (to collect the energy being released as it coasts). This time proven method of mechanical energy has a lot of potential because of how little wasted energy there is.
The 2 methods currenty under research are
1) Large and slow (buried inside a sub station on an electrical power grid)
2) Small and fast (portable in an automobile)
The issue with the small and fast approach is how you fabricate the spinning disk. If a small inacuracy in concentricity produces a "wobble" at 1000 PRM, it gets worse the faster you go. Most current methods employ a computer controled carbon fiber winding machine to collect SPC (Statistical Process Control) data as the wheel is being made and make adjustments "in process". The other area of research is air bearings and aerodynamics. Keeping the heat from friction to a minimum is important because thermal expantion can make the wheel grow a little larger, thus closing the air gap and causing a "touchdown" (this "air==bearing" thing is much like the method employed to "fly" a reader head on a hard drive above the platter).
As material research continues to explore new materials and computer power allows researchers to model these materials in new ways, there really is very little a fly wheel can't do. At the moment they (the large and slow kind) are being used to replace large battery racks in UPS stations in big buildings and on electrical power grids.
___
I would say this is about as lame as lead acid batteries.. THIS, however, is the shit!
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
This is completely impossible. First of all, your composition of air is way off, there is no hydrogen in air, as free hydrogen. Hydrogen reacts violently with air (remember the hindenburg?) to produce water, which is why we have so much water. In a larger sense, space wise, there is massively much more hydrogen than water or oxygen, mainly because the sun is made of hydrogen, fusion doesnt produce as much oxygen etc, but I digress). Everything in the atmosphere is at a low energy state except for trace amounts of methane due to life, but thats an anomoly and not the rule. It is physically impossible to have an energetic reaction using common atmospheric elements, if it were possible then we would be screwed, because it would very quickly occur, all the energy would be released, and we would be fried to a crisp.
An Air/Water Cell is the next logical step.
You are implying then that some catalyist can be found to allow the reaction to proceed, but there has to be a possibl reaction first, and there is no possible reaction between air and water. All a catalyist does is lower the temperature that the reaction occurs at. In a conventional fuel cell, platinum allows hydrogen to be combined with oxygen without a giant fireball. If there were such a high temperature reaction, various above ground nuclear tests would have set it off. In fact, various scientists at the manhattan project were worried about this reaction occuring, i.e that the nitrogen in the air would combine exothermally with the oxygen and produce enough heat to sustain the reaction, and thus making the earth an oven. Lucky for us, it didnt happen, but it also empirically proved that there can be NO reaction between atmospheric constituants that is exothermal.
Basically the first half of the wired article linked to above is with the guy in the discover article. If you read the wired article youll not that it mentions USFS was trying to get a deal with GM to manufacture the things and that it fell through,P>
- http://www.inertialessdrive.co.nz
who are fiddling with this concept as we speak. They have some pretty awesome applications for this technology already. NO, IM NOT AN EMPLOYEE. (I'm gonna buy the water magnetiser just because it sounds so avante garde)don't got no stinkin sig
This hasn't much to do with flywheel technology... its with the opening paragraphs of the article.. It mentions that cars are built "backwards". UGH!
An airfoil is shaped the way it is in order to cause a low pressure airstream on top and a high pressure airstream on the bottom. This causes lift.
Now... lets apply this to a car... what happens... your car flys away? No.. but close.. it would hover a little more while moving... especially on highways (ie when your going fast)... add rain and your fscked... you would hydrofoil and die. Or come close... the reason cars are tapered at the front is to help push the rest of the car down on the wheels giving it traction. Its an essential compromise of aerodynamics and safety.
Stupid rant I know.. but it bugged me.
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
Some early USAF energy weapon work used a "homopolar generator", basically a flywheel spun up to high speed with the field off. The field current was then turned on, and most of the energy in the flywheel came out in a rev or two, producing a big power pulse. I think this technology was actually flown in the 1980s as an experimental system.
Flywheels for short power-outage ride through have been around since the early days of computers. Lots of mainframes came with motor-generator sets to improve power quality. Some vendors, notably IBM and Cray, liked to convert incoming power to 400Hz, simplifying linear power supply design in the computer itself. Switching power supplies are much less vulnerable to power sags, so we don't see those big MG sets any more. No great loss, either. Still, it was nice to know that no power glitch short of total lights-out could make it though the MG and flywheel.
Incidentally, you can build flywheels which fully cancel their own gyroscopic action, using pairs of coaxial counter-rotating wheels. Early Sony Walkman units used such a mechanism.
So flywheel energy storage is a technology that's been around for a while, looking for a killer app. Maybe this time.
You should be okay as long as you keep the bus speed below 88 Mhz.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
...but couldn't you solve this by not mounting the flywheel to the frame of the car? Just mount the flywheel in a gimbal. Then it can precess all it wants.
To recapture the energy of the wheel, mount a small electric generator at the end of the flywheel axle where it mounts to the gimbal.
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These wheels are made of fiber with much the same consistancy at Carot Tops nappy-doo. When the wheel begins to fail, a few of these strands begin to split off and compromises the airbearing, thus slowing the wheel and causing an imbalance. This further stresses the wheel causing even more strand to split off and slowing the wheel even more. Eventially, there are so many loose strands of fibre that the gap between the wheel and the housing is gone and the wheel grinds to a hault.
This small "seized up" flywheel poses very little threat for the same reason an internal combustion engine doesn't toss pistons through the hood of your car: Because there are forces acting on the wheel with an apposing force.
When they fail, they tend to fray (like carot tops hair) and seize up in their housing long before any pieces can cause damage.
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Working for one of those industrial behemoths that does a lot of government contracting, I don't think they would be taking flywheel business away from the people that are already doing it. First of all, industrial behemoths like to partner up with someone who knows what they are doing, and perhaps more importantly, they don't own all the patents.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
At the RPMs needed for automobiles, it's been shown that a metal flywheel can break apart if it is of poor quality or the car gets into an accident. The result is just like a bomb going off, with metal fragments flying everywhere. So one of the challenges is to encase the wheel to shield us from the deadly effects of its shattering. Dangerous as it sounds, so are fossil fuels so it doesn't bother me! Just wear a good flak jacket when you drive...
You can transmit energy, via high-power microwaves. And the sun does a wonderful job of transmitting energy via photons.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
IIRC the article mentioned that satellites would use this configuration, and they could adjust orientations by deliberately changing the balance between the speeds, thus introducing a net angular momentum.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This can also be applied to senate hearings, legal sessions, phylosophical discussions about the existance of ones self, dogs chasing their tails, and any other event or activity that involves a person (either literally or figuratively) running around in circles.
I feel constrained to point out that this will not work if the philosophers do not, in fact, exist.
Even assuming it (seemingly) works, you run the serious risk that the philosophers will take the action of the flywheel as proof that they do exist, and the conversation will end. Not a very reliable power source.
The only way this would work is if the philosophers remained uncertain of the existence of the flywheel. However, to ensure this would require a third conversationalist, dedicated to keeping a contrary position. Thus you have to have an external power source... still no free energy.
I need hardly point out that as soon as the Senate notices they're powering flywheels, they'll put such a tax on it that it will no longer be cost-effective.
Which leaves dogs and lawyers. Frankly, I don't think you've any right to treat dogs that way.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
this comment from the article: The wheels are then derated to - that is, run at - 50 percent of maximum speed made you think: "Ooh! I could
overclock that puppy!"
This reminds me of an idea, I mean a pipe-dream, I had in college for a flywheel powered bicycle. I remember those flywheel powered toy cars Tonka made. Man those things could move!. So I thought, why not put a flywheel on a bicycle and charge it up by braking, then, when it was good and charged up (making a cool jet-engine type whining noise of course) push a button and blast off like those little toy cars.
Well, not being mechanically inclined I of course dropped the idea when I figured out you needed a continuously variable transmission.
I still think it would be really cool. (specially in a place that's got a lot of hills, like S.F... Charge up on the way down, free ride on the way up.)
'Course you'd have to be careful not to end up a nominee for a Darwin award...
Bang the head that doesn't bang!
Is the Scientist's Journal a professional journal or something like Omni or Scientific American? What's its impact factor and how long has it been in business? Does it employ a peer review process?
Crackpot theories usually end up published in some rag with an authoritative sounding name but no peer review process or scientific history to speak of. Unfortunately, after getting their theory published, the crackpot and his followers tend to wave the rag in the air as if it was somekind of a proof that their theory was correct. And when they realize that the publication is not taken seriously, they start screaming about scientific conspiracy.
Let me pick a nit. Exerpted from
"The Hindenberg fear of hydrogen is also misplaced. The paint on the skin of the Hindenberg was composed of similar chemicals to gunpowder, making it extremely inflammable. It is likely the skin that caught fire first, even after which the terrible fire was not fueled by hydrogen, because all the hydrogen was consumed within a minute of the crash (Rogerson, 1991)."
The problem was the paint, not the hydrogen. I like to mention this any time safety concerns involving the Hindenberg crop up. Is there a more focused corollary for Godwin's law in discussions about hydrogen fuels? : )
Now back to your regularly scheduled discussion...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Well drat. I THOUGHT I pasted the URL in there...
a zarsci8/000000fa.htm
The rest of the article talks about some other hydrogen fuel ideas. God I love the Internet.
http://www.chathamtech.com/lazarscience8/_discl
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Any illumination on the subject is appreciated!
Britt
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
back in October 1997. It is available online (costs $$ to actually get the article).
One of the things that always seems to me to be a major roadblock for the widespread use of electric/flywheel/non-combustion engines in cars is the heat problem. Not a case of having too much heat, but not enough. How are you going to heat your car efficently in the winter? Combustion-based cars, of course, just route air by the engine to heat it.. but heating coils and the like draw way too much power for use in electric vehicles.
"You can represent this entire problem as a 3x2 matrix"
Sorry, I don't know what came over me...
To anyone in the industry reading these posts, produce a Flywheel UPS suitable for a PC server at no more than 50% more expensive than a decent lead-acid UPS and I'll buy one for home and I'll recommend them as replacements at work the next time a UPS battery fails...
Does anyone else remember the article in the Aug. 96 Discover magazine that used flywheels in a vacuum as energy storage for cars? I remember being really impressed all around by that article. Wish I knew what happened to that whole project, unlike most promises this one actually seemed a lot more the vaporware.
> "Secondly, angular momentum is conserved. If you get enough flywheels spinning with the proper orientation, you could (in theory) have a serious effect on the Earth's rotation."
I should think that would be the best use for flywheels yet! We mount very large flywheels on each of the poles and bring them up to high speed.
(We can blast them off into space, or keep them down here just in case we change our mind.)
We can slow down the revolution of the Earth and give ourselves longer days! Who hasn't complained that there aren't enough hours in the day??
Alternatively, we can speed up the revolution, and with centrifugal force lessen or nullify the effect of gravity at the equator! This is undeniably very cool, and can have no possible harmful effects.
So many possibilities...
Another page here proposes to use this same technology in a next-generation UPS. They make some pretty bold claims:
Conventional UPS is mainly a combination of high-maintenance diesel-generators and lead-acid batteries. Other flywheel batteries offer only short-term (most "tens of seconds") ride-through power, during utility line outages; and while the utility or on-site generator supplies power, they constantly consume typically kilowatts while idling. That's over 1000x more losses than RPM's Flywheel Battery; which runs far cooler, will have far longer service life, negligible self-discharge, far higher reliability, far lower life-cycle cost, no wear-out, and no maintenance!
There are quite a few additional links at the bottom of that page.
Putting flywheels in moving objects is not the major thrust of the article (I read it in the print version of Wired ages ago, even referenced it in a /. discussion) - simply using a sensible, even retro, technology like this in any application is the point. There's reference to using them as batteries / UPSes for huge installations - factories, power plants. They're very effecient, low maintenance, large batteries. If you're just worried about whether or not they could be used in your car, you're missing the point.
The lead-acid battery is on the way out. It doesn't work all that well, takes up a lot of room, weighs a ton, and royally screws the environment.
I really dig the advanced flywheel and carbon nanotube stuff. But wouldn't it be even better if no batteries were necesary? We have lots and lots of water and we have lots and lots of air. It would be really cool to develop a mechanism to generate electricity using H20 and the chemical compunds found in air (Nitrogen, Hydrogen, Oxygen, etc.) on the spot. Fuel cells are becoming better and better. An Air/Water Cell is the next logical step.
A machine which converted water and air to electricity sounds much like the goal of alchemy. It is a pipe dream. Yes. But e- wants to be free.
Once external energy becomes freely available to everyone anywhere, all manners of political change would follow, not least which would be more free software.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
A laptop with a charged-up flywheel in it might exhibit some interesting gyroscopic effects... you could pick it up, but wouldn't be able to turn it upside down?
Hell, put little feet on it, have it purr, and you'll have a replacement for a cat!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Imagine a planetary scale flywheel, with a radius approximately the same as the earth, or a little less if you bury it about a mile down. If two could be built with perpindicular axes (one a little deeper then the other), it would not only be possible to store vast ammounts of energy, the rotation of the earth itself could be controled!
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Ooooooh no they don't. Well, not in any way that's relevant for pretty much anyone's purposes.
I direct your attention here and here for a detailed explanation.
In brief, what most people call "memory effect" is really a combination of voltage depression resulting from the overcharge performed by all consumer battery chargers, and natural cell aging. Voltage depression does not greatly reduce cell capacity, but it does change the shape of the cell discharge curve - the cell's voltage drops abnormally early in the discharge cycle from the normal 1.2 volts to 1.05 volts or so, which may cause some devices to believe the cell is flat, because a normal NiCd IS very nearly flat when its terminal voltage has fallen this far. A voltage depresed cell, however, can actually deliver about the same amount of energy as it ordinarily would.
Genuine memory effect is very, VERY seldom seen, only occurs in sintered plate NiCd cells, and is in fact CURED by overcharging! Nickel metal hydride batteries are utterly immune to genuine memory effect, although they, too, can suffer from voltage depression.
Would two flywheels with opposite rotational directions fixed to the same object cancel the effects of each other out?
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
As a majority of any committee meeting consists of reactive bantering, and endless hours of one 'spinning his wheels', this flywheel technology could be applied here, so something productive can be actually produced from these all to common corporate events.
This can also be applied to senate hearings, legal sessions, phylosophical discussions about the existance of ones self, dogs chasing their tails, and any other event or activity that involves a person (either literally or figuratively) running around in circles.
Imagine. the senate actually being used as a source of power. It boggles the mind.
Feed The Need[goatse.cx]
Things I'd like to know that the article didn't talk about:
How the magnetic bearings work (esp. in the presence of the magnetic field produced by the motor/generator).
How they measure rotor position for feedback to the magnetic bearings.
If it's a motor/generator, there must be a rotating magnet. Is it intregated with the flywheel, or attached to the side, or what?
Anyone care to comment?
Thanks,
Loopy
Like the article suggested about buses. A flywheel would not be powerful enough to power a vehicle for any significant distance. A turbine running at a constant speed would be the main source of power, with the flywheel augmenting it when necessary. It would be very possible to divert heat from it to heat the passenger compartment.
Just wondering...
Got Rhinos?
Who rated this funny? His first point is a very non-trivial issue and his second is insightful (if a bit ahead of ourselves). I guess I missed the funny part.
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Trinity Flywheel makes some flywheels, and as you can see from the pictures on thier website, almost all flywheels they make are 'barrel shape' rather than the 'platter shape' we usually imagine when we think of flywheels. This is done for two reasons. One is to increase energy w/o increasing rimspeed (more mass = more energy). The other is to simplify the control of the magnetic bearings. There are usually two, one at each end of the shaft. the further apart these guys get the easier it is to stabilize the flywheel. In fact, you can build a system that only actively controls the flywheel in one axis. The 6 axis controls needed for a big platter are a bear.
You fail the Turing test. Sorry.
Goddamit how can you moderate this guy down? He is making a good point that Greenland is near the north pole so ice melting in the north pole could result in higher sea levels.
This kind of busses was used in Copenhagen for some years. For some reason they stopped buying this kind of busses. I think they started using gas powered bussus instead. Sadly the gas powered busses had a bad habit of catching fire, so maybe switching was a bad choice. I don't know what they use now.
Further reading on fly wheel engines: Danish experimentarium, Canadian traffic something and last but not the least Google search
Actually, there's another method for storing and retrieving energy from a flywheel based on embedding magnets in the flywheel and keeping it levitated in a vacuum. You use the rotating magnets to drive an electric motor and charge them up by reversing the polarity. Since there's no mechanical attachment to an engine and next to no friction, you can theoretically keep the momentum stored in the flywheel indefinitely. I remember reading about a guy who had come up with an automobile engine based on this design in Discover magazine about a few years ago. Unfortunately, the guy was a bit of a patriotic zealot and refused to sell the design to anybody but American auto manufacturers who had only a passing interest in making it into a backup for a hybrid engine design. The Japanese were biting at the bit to buy his technology for use in non-hybrid applications, but he refused to sell. A shame. People all over the world might be using his engine design now if he hadn't been so against letting a foreign company use it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Tesla was one of the most brilliant minds who ever lived. His discoveries are no longer taught widely because of their military applications.
From: earthpulse.com/haarp/
The HAARP Program is jointly managed by the US Air Force and the US Navy, and is based in Gakona, Alaska. It is designed to "understand, simulate and control ionospheric processes that might alter the performance of communication and surveillance systems." The HAARP system intends to beam 3.6 Gigawatts of effective radiated power of high frequency radio energy into the ionosphere in order to:
*Generate extremely low frequency (ELF) waves for communicating with submerged submarines
*Conduct geophysical probes to identify and characterize natural ionospheric processes so that techniques can be developed to mitigate or control them
*Generate ionospheric lenses to focus large amounts of high frequency energy, thus providing a means of triggering ionospheric processes that potentially could be exploited for Department of Defense purposes,
*Electron acceleration for infrared (IR) and other optical emissions which could be used to control radio wave propagation properties
Generate geomagnetic field aligned ionization to control the reflection/scattering properties of radio waves,
*Use oblique heating to produce effects on radio wave propagation, thus broadening the potential military applications of ionospheric enhancement technology.
You should check out the site, it's amazing what Tesla discovered and scary as hell what some people want to do with it.
An old sci-fi book I found by accident... I can't even remember the author (though I did recognize it) or the name. (very useful information, I know..)
One of the concepts in this book, however, was the idea of using a (sci-fi) kerr-newman black hole as an extremely massive flywheel. The (sci-fi) theory is that a kerr-neuman black hole is basically a very tiny black hole (event horizon of perhaps 200 meters or so.. something human manageable) that is electrically charged. It is also spinning, rapidly. Remember, a black hole this size STILL weighs an unimaginable ammount.
So they built these huge shielding chambers, they'd put a black hole in side it (it's got an electric charge.. they can move them around using this...), and it sits in there and spins. Fast. By feeding energy into the chamber, they can spin it faster, and by tapping the Electric field (generator?) they can take power, causing it to slow. The deal was, though, that one of these jobs, even without replenishing hte power, could, once charged (and they were naturally charged when found) could hold enough energy to power cities (or planets) for years.
Unfortunately, it's not criminal... nobody who discovers something is obliged to share it.
If your tax dolars fund the military, who funds research, who develops cold fusion for powering weapons (like subs and planes).. they aren't obliged to share it with you. Nope. Not at all. It would be against 'national security' to do so.
In the corporate world, this is what patents were supposed to be about... so people would be encouraged to share.
Is anyone else concerned by this? First off, the gyroscopic effects already mentioned would be real, and prominent. Richard Feynman used to put a flywheel in a suitcase and give it to a bellhop as a practical joke. (The suitcase would almost fly out of the poor sap's hand at the first corner.)
Secondly, angular momentum is conserved. If you get enough flywheels spinning with the proper orientation, you could (in theory) have a serious effect on the Earth's rotation. They'd have to be spinning pretty bloody fast and be aligned just right, but it's possible. What happens when the factory ships a truckload of these? I hope they design two models, with spins oriented anti-parallel...
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
My high school chemistry teacher was a former naval officer. As a midshipman in the 1920s, he and some buddies installed a big gyroscope in a suitcase, spun it up on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, walked straight in to the front desk, set it down, booked a room, and laughed their middie asses off when the poor bellhop picked it up and tried to turn around.
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Infuriate left and right