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.

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[phandel]

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.

Re:Carbon Nanotubes

[Anonymous Coward]

The research has gone pretty far in the last few years. I worked on producing carbon nanotubes for my undergraduate thesis in physics in 1994-1995, when metal doping of the carbon electrodes was first described for generating single-wall nanotubes (SWNT's). Since then, fullerene research has pretty much continued at a feverish rate, with numerous papers published each year describing improved methodology, fullerene properties, and new practical applications. These have for the most part born out the incredible theoretical predictions about their unique properties, including astronomical length to width ratio, superb tensile strength and geometry-dependent conductivity. Like the laser, fullerenes hold the promise of being a solution looking for a problem.

In answer to the question specifically on carbon nanotubes, there has been a lot of experimentation done on them. Carbon nanotubes come in a variety of geometries that can be thought of conceptually as rolling chicken wire (a hexagonal array) up with varying amounts of stagger or offset. They can range in conductivity from metallic to semiconducting, depending on this geometry (Science, 288(5465):494-7). They have been used as tips for atomic force microscopes (PNAS, 97(8):3809-13). Tensile strength studies have found individual nanotubes with a Young's modulus E of nearly 1 TPa, or 1000 GPa (Science, 287(5453):637-40). Various other electromechanical applications like field emission effect (Science, 283(5401):512-4) have been dreamed up.

Not being in the field any longer, I can't make any predictions about timescales of the integration of carbon nanotubes into new technologies. However, you can usually tell that a material is no longer just a laboratory curiosity when the major chemical distributors start selling it, like Sigma-Aldrich. The fact is that carbon nanotube production is incredibly cheap and easy (doable by a fresh undergrad student, yours truly...). It is the purification of the desired nanotube type from the mishmash of soot you obtain from the arc that is the real challenge.

Ryan.