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Flywheel UPS
DrZap writes: "Saw this in a trade magazine, a UPS using a flywheel to store kinetic energy instead of batteries. Environment friendly and everything!"
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These things have other problems not mentioned here. Most severe is the the way they deliver power; as the wheel spins down the voltage they deliver drops. Anyone counting on these things to run for a long time better way over-purchase.
AC
NASA Glenn Research Center was working on flywheel technology to use in lieu of the batteries on the ISS. I guess the idea is that batteries have a much shorter usable life span before they need to be replaced and transporting replacements becomes a burden. Unfortunately the project got eliminated in this year's budget for the center. I guess somebody had stock in Energizer. :-) I will remain anonymous since the last person who spoke out about the project cut in our local newspaper was fired. :-/
Duh. Lead is soft. You encase the lead in a thin shell of harder metal. Next problem?
How cool.
This will be repeated at every lunch break at the company, for the amazement of everyone. After the loose side of the box has gently fallen on the ground, 10 strong employees will put back the 850 lbs Flywheel Module on 4 bricks for tomorrow's show.
Unfortunately, this puts an enormous stress on the device, and it will break after a few show. MTBF of 100,000 Hours? Not in "normal conditions"!
Not much of a problem, is it?
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Why not? That's the type of customer they want buying these things. Those racks of storage batteries have to be replaced sometime. They are pitching this as an alternative that doesn't have to be replaced every few years.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The company took great pains to discuss flywheel safety. As you know, there is a pretty big danger of this massive disk spinning around at high speeds and suddenly breaking apart due to physical forces and spreading shrapnel around everywhere.
I think it is bound to happen as these devices become more popular, but it probably will be fairly unusual.
The only reason I mention this is that I am "somewhat" amused by the idea that a new technology is creating a new way of dying as well. Perhaps there will be a day where the casual newspaper reader will come across the headline "Two engineers killed in flywheel discharge in Coeur d'Alene" and not think it out of the ordinary.
This also goes along with the idea that mother nature will invent all sorta of gruesome ways of dying to deal with the fact that we keep on solving conventional ways of dying as time goes on. In the end, I suspect that she will be forced to rely on spontaneous human combustion as the catch-all unsolvable/incurable death once science has cured disease and engineers have prevented most accidents. Until then, expect that flywheel discharge will occasionally send a hapless individual into their next life.
see, for example, The Bunker, which was built during the 70's and 80's, and uses rotational inertia for 'power smoothing'. Their Tech Info pages are an interesting read, and there's a nice photo of their 'Power Buffers', too. This might be a bit overkill to run in your basement, though.
We're going back to moving parts here. At least a battery-based UPS would have minimal moving parts, probably a few relays for overcurrent protection and a transformer with a moving center tap to regulate voltage in the traditional UPS. With a big moving part like a flywheel, we have got a fair bit of noise here. The specs say less than 55 dB, which is roughly the amount of noise produced by a typical conversation. And the efficiency of the system is somewhat pathetic. The system can store up to 2 kWh of energy. It takes three hours for it to store up this much energy with an input power of 2.5 kW, meaning you input 7.5 kWh of energy to it. The remaining 5.5 kWh of energy was wasted. Wasting so much energy is not the way to be environmentally friendly! True, a traditional battery based UPS would cause environmental pollution when you tried to dispose of it, but 5.5 kWh of wasted energy every time you had to recharge the thing would likely produce even more pollution in total. True, the system may have many potential advantages, especially for use in harsh environments that would ruin most battery-based systems, but to call it environmentally friendly is an absolutely laughable claim. It is probably even less environmentally friendly than the average battery UPS, it just produces a different kind of pollution (by wasting much of the energy provided to it from the power generation system). And one more thing: the thing is immense, it weighs a total of 1050 lbs!
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Might as well coat the flywheel with oxide, put a bunch of R/W heads around it and get some use out of the thing as rotating memory while the power is on. Wish I could post some pictures of some drum memory units from the 50's - they are BIG.
;)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I did some contract work for a place that used a flywheel on their old CDC mainframe. It wasn't just for emergencies, it was the power-filter too. One little spike in the AC doesn't tweak a flywheel much, so being a UPS was only part of the use.
EMC uses this in their Internet Solutions Group center. If you want to find out about how it works in action, or see a successful data center using it, call your EMC rep.
:-)
It may be huge and heavy, but it's a damn sight easier to manage than a room full of lead-acid batteries, and you don't have to refill it every five years or contact the EPA every time you do any work on it.
Makes cooler noises, too.
-
The personal computer version ought to fit into a 5.25" drive bay and double as a CD-ROM drive. Most modern CD-ROM drives seem to build enough angular momentum to run a refrigirator for a couple of hours anyway.
But then again, a friend of mine was nearly decapitated by a Toshiba X32 drive with a premature ejection problem.
But wait! Bury enough of these things and we'll eventually have enough angular momentum to shift the Earth's axis! Think, man! This will kill us all!
Hey, maybe this is the reason Uranus is rolling around on its side...
Chelloveck
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Actually, my father once told me that some passenger busses in europe used flywheels for movement. Don't know too much about the details, a few google searches should turn up something.
Geoff
Only problem is, from the website, it's too big to replace the conventional UPS that most places have. It has to be put underground, and it stores 2kWh of energy.
// mlc, user 16290
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On a larger scale, this could solve the current energy problems. The problem isn't one of energy presources so much as energy delivery. If flywheels could be charged (like batteries, but with much less loss in the charging process) during off-peak hours, they could be used to cover overextensions at peak hours.
/. around the beginning of the year about power companies burying large flywheels underground to cover brownouts and short-duration blackouts. This could be a great growth industry.
I read an article on
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
What do you define as living near? Unless you are sleeping with this next to you.... you have little to worry about.
After all, we have thousand ton trains hurtling around with FAR more kinetic energy than this flywheel would ever have...
First, regarding the Gyroscope question.
,or kernels for short, if it rings a bell). The idea was these things were both spinning at a great velocity, and electrically charged (so they could be magnetically manipulted) so they shielded them, moved them around, and used them as humungous flywheels for storing and retrieving energy.
A single flywheel would act as a gyroscope, yes.
Two equally massive flywheels spinning in opposite directions but at the same rate would effectively cancel the effect though. (This has been tried with bicycles to prove that balancing a bike is not actually due to gyroscopic effects).
I'm no scientist, but it seems to me that flywheels, no matter what, will be more efficient the larger they are, given that friction is the only thing that will cause the flywheel to lose energy... and friction is a function of the surface area of the wheel.... wheras the amount of energy stored is based on the mass... and as surface area is a square function, wheras mass is cubic, you end up with diminishing returns as things get smaller.
Same sort of thing as why a flea can jump 50x it's own height (or whatever the number is) but a human can't... as muscle strength is proportional to cross sectional area of the muscle, but mass is proportional to volume....
Also, one issue is the possibility of explosion in any mobile device. The fact that a chemical cell can only discharge so fast can also be viewed as a safety feature when we're talking about consumer devices. A nano-flywheel-cell or something in a phone might have a propensity to explode violently should something disturb it.
Also, regarding some sci-fi.. I *wish* I could remember the author or title.. but I recall reading some sci-fi from the 50's or 60's that dealt partially with using some small-ish black-holes (they called them kerr-newman black holes
I was visiting one of Above.Net's hosting facilities a few weeks ago, as my employer haqs decided to use them as a hosting facility. They use a flywheel storage/conditioning system, and have for some time now. Above Surface. And not all that big. . . Pretty slick, plus they have redundancy. As I recall, the flywheel/UPS/powerconditioner is a German product, sorry, no specs on the manufaturer. . .
If you use just one flywheel mounted vertically - make sure you spin it down before you park the car - otherwise your car will roll over onto its back like a turtle in the next 12 hours. Ok, it probably won't have sufficient mass/velocity to actually make this happen but the idea is nice :-)
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Hmmm, a quick search on Google turns up plenty of hits for this stuff - it's not THAT new.
h eel/papers/powertrades-oct98/ - a NASA study from 1998
http://www.afstrinity.com/
http://www.activepower.com
http://www.acumentrics.com
http://space-power.grc.nasa.gov/ppo/projects/flyw
All with URLs displayed, for you who fear goatse.cx. Somehow, this doesn't look like that new of a technology. (And besides, I thought a REGULAR UPS was heavy!)
What's your damage, Heather?
Reading between the lines of their web site, I believe they intend these to be useful in places where the cost of replacing batteries is significant. Even if the batteries are only a couple hundred dollars, getting a crew to the location with the batteries could cost many times more.
:-)
I have supported sites where onsite maintanence cost $7,000 per incident (and just wasn't possible for parts of the year). Sure makes you think twice before typing each remote command.
Maybe these things will be common someday, not soon. Railroad crossing lights in the US used to be powered by large buried batteries. Periodicly trains would come by, hoist out the old one and put in a new one then haul the old one back for recharging. Maybe 40 years from now using chemical batteries in UPSs will seem just as silly.
Course it's not much good if the outage takes down your ISP. (Like happen to my Uni this week)
IBM Lexington mega facility had that for years. Basically it's a big motor generator set. It also makes for one hell of a surge protector. The motor laughs at anything less than a direct lightning strike. For blackouts, The flywheel keeps going long enough to crank up the Diesel.
Cheers
This is a boring sig
Reminds me of those old MFM Seagates...
Seriously - does anyone really want something that weighs half a ton and spins so damned fast that it'll drive a generator for three hours sitting next to them?
High capacity deep-cycle lead acid batteries trample all over those figures. A quality lead acid 12V battery that can deliver 25 amps (300 watts) for more than seven straight hours (more than 175Ah, at that discharge rate) costs maybe $US400, and weighs maybe 60 kilos.
The problem is that the batteries need maintaining. Also if the idea of the UPS is to supply power whilst a generator is brought on line then being able to run for 7 hours isn't really relevant.
The moment of inertia is proportional to mass, but also greater when mass is distributed farther away from the centre of motion, (varying as r^2), so having a physically large mass is one way of getting away with lower spinning speeds
Thus you want a wheel rather than a simple disk. With most of the mass on the rim.
How are these normally installed--inline or failover?
The reason I ask is that if they're implemented inline, they might be able to kinda act as a proxy for the A/C. That could be important because apparently Van Eck/Tempest phreaking has become somewhat passe' in fedland. Instead it's (apparently) possible to observe what a computer is doing by reading the power lines. No, I don't have references; it's really a he-said-she-said thing.
But what I'm wondering is if you could use a flywheel to clean and sterilize your A/C current usage.
My boss was recently reminiscing about something that sounded exactly the same. The computer took an entire three story building however and was freon cooled, so such a thing was a necessity. It was also hooked up to 500 horsepower generator, so it wasn't really environmentally friendly either.
:)
But it did have a really fast punchcard reader.
Actually one of the companies mentioned above has a mobile product, using two opposed flywheels:
http://www.afstrinity.com/specs/spec_mfpm.html
Interesting that the currently available systems seem mainly aimed at high-drain short duration applications - would they be less efficient at much lighter loads (e.g. as primary power source)?
this will be PERFECT for windows users, as they're barely a step up from hamsters anyway. oh wait, what kind of wheel?
Thus, if he takes a right angle corner, he'll have to walk in such a way to keep one suitcase before him, and the other one behind (rather than the usual position of one to the left, and one to the right). Not only will this be very uncomfortable (especially if heavy), but it will also look suspicious as hell...
Wouldn't the Bellhop notice that the suitcases are slightly trembling, as soon as he picks them up (a little bit like the feel of a holding a spinning HD in your hands)? And what about that whirring sound?
And, as the prankster himself has to walk in a straight line with the suitcases once they're active, wouldn't this force him to do the spinning up part in a straight line before the hotel lobby (and thus probably in plain view)?
I know that Comnet corp. did this a long time ago in their offices in Washington, D.C. Their flywheel was able to power their mainframes for just a few minutes though, to give them time to turn on a backup diesel generator.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
>>BTW: If you built portable flywheel "batteries", would they act like gyroscopes?
If my understanding of physics is correct, then a simple flywheel would *have* to act like a gyroscope. Maybe two wheels spinning in opposite directions or something.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
New use for depleted uranium?
Flywheels would solve almost all of those problems. I'm not an expert, but from what I understand, the biggest problem is developing materials that can withstand rotating the the enormous velocities requires. It sounds like fuel cells will come out sooner.
This is more of a problem with vehicles, where the flywheel is subject to tradeoffs between operating at a very high speed to store a lot of energy, practical limits on flywheel size and weight, and the weight of the armor around the flywheel needed to prevent potentally deadly chunks from flying loose if it does disintegrate. I understand they're trying to develop graphite composite flywheels for vehicles.
None of this has to be a huge problem for a fixed installation, however. You could make it massive and fairly fast and put three feet of reinforced concrete around it without too much trouble.
With the flywheel hub/axle mounted vertically it would only torque the car when power was being added to or removed from it. Two counterrotating flywheels would cancel even this effect, and the engine mounts would mainly have to deal with changes in the road's incine because the gyroscopic effects would try to keep the car from leaning or pitching up and down.
Mounted sideways, though, those effects would oppose turns and aim the car in unexpected directions when they were attempted.
On the third hand, I'm not sure any of that would apply enough force to matter.
Evidently no human injuries were reported, but a few walls were casualties.
Back in the 1970s when I was working aboard the Hughes Glomar Explorer (http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/jennifer.h tm) (hunting manganese nodules; wink wink) the control system for the heavy lift mechanism was based on 16vdc CMOS technology. The voltage spikes aboard a 50,000 ton ship with 4480 volt mains could be truly extraordinary and to eliminate these spikes we had a flywheel-type UPS.
This UPS wasn't really used as a UPS because a loss of power would affect more than just the control system (the hydraulic systems ran off of pumps which were operated by electric motors) but it sure ironed out the spikes nicely.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
UPS trucks are brown. Not FedEx trucks.
Ya know you should look up the word
hyperbole (h-pûrb-l) n.
Now some quick calulations
I found a reference for the energy release of good ole TNT or trinitrotoluene is around 4680 joules/gram.
Lets see 1 Jjoule is 1 watt*sec therefore
2 Kw*H ~ 1.5 Kilo of pure TNT.
I think that could destroy a masonary wall quite nicely. The time period the energy is release is very important.
BTW, Just cross checked the above calculation with a cool site
http://www.megaconverter.com/mega2/
If you removed the bricks on one side then you would get a (huge )torque induced at an 90 angle or horizonal in this case. A top can balance horizonally and seem to defy gravity only as long as it can rotate itself along the vertical axis. Stop it and falls immediately.
If you attempted what you suggest your flywheel would start spinning uncontrolled and would reduce 10 city blocks to rumble and hence why they bury this thing.
Close... KE = .5 m*v^2
Too much relativity in a nonrealistic world...
The higher, the fewer.
Heh, that was my first thought too. Flywheels WOULD make a lot of sense for delivery trucks though, with their constant stops. Flywheel brakes transfer energy to a flywheel to stop the vehicle, instead of just creating waste heat through friction. The energy in the spinning flywheel can then be used to accelerate again.
Kinetic energy weapon. I read their safety page and I'm still nervous. Their odds of one in a million for failure modes still seem rather high to me.
Another thing that springs to mind is reference to flywheels as energy storage in science fiction. Harry Harrison uses flywheels as a technological prop for powering motorcycles/monocycles in his Stainless Steel Rat series. You charge (spin up) the flywheel at night and use the stored kinetic energy by day. Use regenerative braking to get back some energy for "free" while you ride. And you get the gyroscope effect to keep the bike upright. Very quiet, simple and clean. Neat idea.
Does it also work for FedEX vehicles? ... So that's how those big brown trucks full of packages get around!
Oh, the horror :-) Sorry if this is off-topic, but the image that just sprang to mind is so compelling ...
Right now I'm seeing scores of marketeers at FedEx and UPS clutching there hearts over that comment. I don't know which group would be more apoplectic, the FedEx guys for misidentifying their mortal enemy (UPS)'s trucks as FedEx delivery vehicles or UPS for hanging FedEx's our-name-is-a-verb on that oh so distinctive brown truck. You just wiped out two different companies' marketing droids with one swift blow!
Who'da thunk it? -- an employee fitness program and disaster contingency program all in one!
One of the leading companies in this market: Piller, has a lot of very useful information on their web site.
If you were to use high speed vacuum sealed flywheels on magnetic bearings then the friction is obviously very low, and the limit on the lifetime of the system is a material limit. Currently a fair amount of development cash is beiong spent on making fibre materials to use in flywheels which don't fail catastrophically, have predictable and high failure stresses and low creep.
There was an article about this in Wired a few months back.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
In the unlikely event of failure, our composite rim is designed to delaminate in a safe and controllable manner.
I guess 'explode into shreds' didn't score well with the managers...
Unfortunately, the average person can only maintain about 75 watts output while pedaling. People who train, and bike regularly have been known to do 120 watts. Note, this is sustained for long periods of time, not burst output, which can be 300 or more watts for short periods. This flywheel unit does 500 watts for 4 hours.
Temkin
Caterpillar and several other companies make smaller ones (file cabinet sized). Check out Cat here .
maru
I would disagree with this, and claim that the future looks even more divided. The poor will get poorer (and more numerous) while the rich get richer and play with all their new toys. It's been a constant trend over the whole of human history - the greater the number of people, the less fair the division of resources. There are exceptions to this trend, as with all generalisations, but the statistics bear the argument out. And population will increase, despite (almost) all that War, Famine, Pestilence & Stupidity throw in our way.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Sadly, the actual power output contributed by a rigged-up exercise bike is pretty minimal - you have to go at a pretty high rate to provide the same output as a normal lightbulb would require, & not many people can keep up a decent speed for very long. The costs of installing such a system would well outweigh the power benefits, although the exercise provided would undeniably be helpful. A small wind turbine or solar panel system on the roof would almost certainly do much better as a power source.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Stanby power generators usually have adjustable Jacket Water Heaters and will start and be ready for full load within 10 seconds per the requirments of NFPA. A flywheel solution is the best because if the flywheel is spinning, you know you have power protection. With batteies, one cell can be bad and your entire system could possible not work. Flywheel backup only lasts for a sort period of time, but if your generator won't start within 10 second, it's not going to... so your S.O.L. I quess you should have bought better equipment like Caterpillar and you generator would have started!
High capacity deep-cycle lead acid batteries trample all over those figures. A quality lead acid 12V battery that can deliver 25 amps (300 watts) for more than seven straight hours (more than 175Ah, at that discharge rate) costs maybe $US400, and weighs maybe 60 kilos. That price might be high; I'm not an expert on the pricing of any battery I can't carry up stairs :-).
Four of those suckers in parallel feeding your inverter and you've got the flywheel system's sustained output, with more than three times the capacity.
A plain 1.5kW inverter with output at least somewhat like a sine wave is $US350 or so, for a basic model - more, no doubt, for a fancy standby-power-control pure-sine-wave thingummy. But since Beacon Power don't even quote pricing for their buried half-ton humming monster, you can bet that traditional systems are FAR cheaper.
OK, I suppose you pay for reliability, and if the thing really does last 20 years with zero maintenance then that's something. But properly treated high-grade lead acid batteries have ten year service lives. And the lead's recyclable; dedicated recycling places will pay you by weight for dead wet lead acid batteries.
This is the best thing since sliced bread! But... if sliced bread had never come around, I have to ask, what would have been the previous best thing?
Counter rotating flywheels do not cancel gyroscopic effects. Having flywheels in a counter rotating configuration doesn't cancel the tendency of their axes to keep pointing in the same direction. It just reduces the "twisting" effects when you try to point their axes somewhere else.
Also the other way to get more out of the flywheel is to have a relatively small one spin very very fast, using magnetic or some other near frictionless bearings. Strong materials like carbon fibre are commonly used for such flywheels.
And many chemical cells can explode violently when discharged at rates higher than their spec allows, especially those high energy+power density cells commonly used in modern power hungry mobile devices.
Cheerio,
Link.
From their technical specifications page . . .
Weight--Flywheel Module: 850 lbs
Weight--Electronics Module: 200 lbs
That's a total of 1050 pounds! I'll stick with my 5 pound APC UPS for now. Plus, my landlord would not appreciate 1/2 ton of weight in our second floor computer room!
The specs on the flywheel system are pretty interesting, too. It is definitely big and noisy - more so than my 586 full tower web server box.
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Though as always, people push this thing into new scales periodically.
A well-known chip maker in the Silicon Valley (which shall go unnamed since I can't remember who it is) has been doing this for power conditioning purposes for some time. It prevents spikes from harming your multi-million dollar fab equipment.
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ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Flywheels! So that's how those big brown trucks full of packages get around!
Dunno about depleted uranium... but I think it would be the same thing.
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C'mon, flame me!
No sig for the moment.
(my figures could be wrong but they run along those lines)
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C'mon, flame me!
No sig for the moment.
As featured a year ago on /., and in Wired, ooh, long since.
Acoustical Noise: 55 dBA at 6 ft. (when installed in the ground).
At this level of noise how can they claim it's environmentally friendly? What exact does "when installed in the ground" mean.....
"A dudu A dada" that's all I want to say to you
...you can find it here
To write a haiku - all you need is the correct - number of syli...
I was just thinking about time-shifting power use to help avoid blackouts and high energy costs. This unit could be more efficient at energy conversion than a chemical (i.e. battery) one, and *much* more suitable for *daily* use.
Imagine using it to power a small window-mounted A/C for 5-6 hours during peak loads. Then rev it back up at 2-3am.
Couple this with an advanced on-peak/off-peak *charging* scheme by the utilities, and you'd probably have something that would pay for itself! (Well, depending how much this sucker is.)
I don't believe anything with moving parts is maintenance free. And I don't trust any flying wheel with an operating system.
Operating systems crash. Well, some of them, at least.
Dave
bm :)-~
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I'm thinking of the Glomar Challenger. Is that a similar deal experimental drilling? Man, that's history books stuff there.
So what's up with the manganese nodule deal anyway? Was that ever a commercially feasible project? I understand there were numerous environmental issues involved.
I ask myself why nobody's mining the vents off of South America. I recall various explorations talking about toxic plumes full of exotic metals and bizarre life forms. But, I haven't heard of any commercial success.
I realize this is off topic, but this seems so intriguing in that here we have an environment that is naturally toxic and rich in highly reactive minerals in the guise of undersea vents that goes untapped while we create our own toxic wastes on land and don't know where to get rid of them.
Whoa, the Golmar Explorer had a flywheel too! Well, why not? Those ships had to stay as close to one spot as possible while they were drilling the pipe down into the floor. Was there any gyroscopic effect? Did you have to take that into account as a computer motor control person? You were a computer motor control person, weren't you? Oh, I'm impressed either way.
California Gov. Gray Davis (an avid /. reader) just inking an order for 33,871,648 of these.
No wonder that Maytag repair guy was always so depressed! All those kilotonnes of cleaning power ready to go off at any moment.
Even notice that they slipped a new guy into the commercials? What happened to the old guy?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why are they so big and expensive? You should be able to produce a flywheel UPS for use with PC's within a small enclosure. Anyone have any good reasons? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it's a precisely balanced flywheel and it's supported by magnetic bearings in a vacuum. They didn't just fill a coffee can with cement and stick it on the end of a motor.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
At our telecom and ATM provider, they simply use a (relative, it's still a shitload) small batteryfarm, and they keep one dieselgen permanently at 35C or something, so it starts withing 3 seconds.
This combination leasts long enough to launch the other generators...
I'd love to see their entrprise solution. Would it be larger or smaller than the computer room it was designed to power...
I'd expect though that you could be a happy energy concious 21st century citizen by reading the Mother Earth news which would recommend scrapping the computer instead of getting a flywheel to power it.
I have to say though, It's certainly an interesting concept.
--CTH
--
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
This is so cool. The thing I like about the idea of using a flywheel as a UPS is that it is a 3D realworld earthy 'thing' that I can relate to. Unlike say the somewhat abstract concept of electricity. Assuming my house could stand the weight of this thing - which it could as I'd just put it in the soil on my raised home ('Queenslander' style on stilts) If the price was okay, which it is not at the moment sadly, it would be worth it just for the toy value. The love many guys have with cars strongly relates to the 1000kg of metal and constant volatile explosions which any non-techie can love.
And battreies are environmentally wasteful and my USP goes through them at an expensive rate.
Side off-the-topic note: has anybody had success with truck batteries as a cheap UPS replacement when the internal batteries die. I can't see the problem personally as the voltage is the same. And like this flywheel thing, it would rok to have a truck battery on the desktop!
There are thousands of criminals in prisons across the country. Make them ride stationary bicycles to generate electricity.
The real attraction to these is that they live for a long time. Even if you have power problems, they won't be stressed very much, and in the long run, you save money by not having to keep on buying new batteries when the old ones inevitably die, regardless of use.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
But then, what do I know?
This is old news. These things have been around for a while. Above.net uses them as an interim UPS system for their NOCs before the generators kick in.
With the current slow trend of fuel cell technology advancement, flywheel could very well become the underdog that will be viable on the market. Expect to see flywheels powering cars, buses and laptops.
...but nice technology. I worked for three years with a company who had their own home-made version - 15Kw motor, huge (way bigger than 150lb) flywheel, 10Kva alternator providing power to servers and computers. No vacuum or super bearings but it worked like a charm. We switched over from main (275Kva) genset to small (55Kva) at lunchtimes and at the end of the working day. All this in Guyana where the power company simply couldnt deliver enough power. And I have watched "smart" ups boxes smoulder and fry...
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
Hope that helps.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Caterpiller sent a little promotional flywheel to work one day, pretty novel idea I think, but the one from beacon has to be placed underground??? why is that, pretty difficult to implement! the CAT UPS is only 10 feet Square and performes comprably if not superiorly!
No, he dont have to go in a strait line, he can move any direction, but he must keep the briefcases in the same direction.
A gyro do not stop you from moving it, but it will resist changing the direction of the axsis it is spinning around.
There are a lot of posts about the age of this technology already, I just wanted to mention that around 8 years ago I saw a much smaller version in a hospital.
At the time there weren't that many mission critical computers (something like 10, and then a billion monitors and whatnot, that wouldn't choke at the temporary outage until the generators started). The generator they used was about waist-high and about 3 feet by 2 feet.
Wouldn't you therefore want the flywheel to be as massive as possible? This is a fairly common misconception. When it's something like the flywheel on an internal combustion engine where the RPM's are limited by what it is attached to, then more weight may be necessary. But for energy storage, linked electrically, the limit on RPM's is usually just the strength/density ratio of the material.
e = m * v^2
So 2x the rotational rate (at a given diameter) gives 4x the energy stored. So what works best is to use a very strong material and spin it as fast as possible without coming apart.
It's so big because it's NOT for PC's. It provides 1,000 W for 4 hours, and their suggested market is telecommunications. Typical small UPS's provide 250 to 500 W for about 15 minutes. 99% of power outages are much less than that. If the lights are out in an office for 15 minutes, they'll probably send people home -- but the phone company switches work just fine in the dark, and should stay up through the longest outages. I can also see this unit as a server backup system when you need extremely high availability, except I didn't drill down deep enough to see the output voltages -- I think telecom systems run on 48VDC, so you'd need a different electronics module for computers.
It probably could be made in smaller size for a PC, but some of the costs don't scale down well, so I'd expect it to be too expensive.
Thus you want a wheel rather than a simple disk. With most of the mass on the rim. No. The energy stored is proportional to the moment of inertia times the square of the rotational rate -- so speeding it up pays off much more than increased moment of inertia. But high speed requires great strength so the flywheel doesn't fly apart. High energy flywheels are usually disks of high strength material, and sometimes even thicker in the middle to give it the strength to hold the rim together.
isn't the idea of flywheels that they store energy kinetically? Wouldn't you therefore want the flywheel to be as massive as possible in order to store the most energy at a given rotational speed? It seems odd to be trying to build a lightweight flywheel for a vehicle, almost backwards for some reason.
One heck of a day-trade a couple of times last week. Wednesday and Thursday. California news must have driven it.
Not if you have good bearings. I don't have any suitcases with flywheels in them myself, so I don't really know, but I imagine that vibrations and noise could be minimized, or at least kept at a low enough level that a busy bellhop wouldn't notice immediately in a noisy hotel lobby. It doesn't have to fool him forever. Besides, it doesn't have to spin at 3200 RPM like hard drives do. If its mass or radius is large enough it doesn't have to spin that fast at all.
As for spinning up the wheels, it's easy. Just drive your car up to the curb, spin up the suitcases inside the car, and then get out and walk straight in. You could probably even do it in plain sight, I doubt there would be any bellhops standing around staring at you through the hotel lobby doors. It doesn't matter if other people see.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Ingredients:
2 large suitcases
2 large flywheels
A nice hotel
Fasten the flywheels inside of the suitcases, one in each. Point them in the direction of the hotel and spin them up, then close them (looks like two innocent suitcases). Take both suitcases and walk in to the hotel (in a straight line). Get a bellhop to take your luggage. Watch as the bellhop rounds a corner and the suitcases jump out of his hands! He'll probably think your suitcases have been posessed by the devil :-)
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Think carbon fiber and 100,000rpm ...
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/flywheel.h tml
LOL, and to think I'm doing research in applications of electromagnetic clutches...
God spoke to me
High school physics experiment: Use a string to dangle the 850 lb UPS by one corner. Watch it slowly precess around the string. It hangs in the air like magic!
Why are they so big and expensive? You should be able to produce a flywheel UPS for use with PC's within a small enclosure. Anyone have any good reasons?
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Who does this? Their graph even shows 1 year replacement. UPS Batteries should last a lot longer than that. If they had graphed a 10 year battery life their flywheel wouldn't look so good.
...how often do I have to change the hamster?
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Stay in school, kids! Peace out, Dubya
Honestly.... I wouldn't enjoy living anywhere near 850 pounds of fast spinning flywheel when a quake hits. Please don't bring these things to Los Angeles!!!
Well... yes. And this would mean that if the damn wheel would ever fall out of it's socket and start rollin' along, it would try to go in as straight a path as it possibly can!
Maybe two wheels spinning in opposite directions or something.
So I don't wanna live on either side!
What if the flywheels get rust? I can just imagine having to use WD-40 on my ups.
your error is in thinking that what you decry as the "future" is the result of technology. the fact is that humanity has spent the vast majority of its existance in abject poverty, pestilence and squallor.
but a funny thing happened: private property and capitalism. i recomend reading Human Action by Ludwig Von Mises for some real information on economics.
want to prevent poverty? defend property rights.
want to prevent polution? defend property rights.
on the SUBJECT, remember that stored energy increases with mass on a linear basis, but exponentially with RPM's. so you're better off with a light flywheel turning really fast, than with a slow heavy one.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Flywheels are old news amongst the renewable energy community. The first mechanical inverters (DC->AC converters) were just a DC motor connected to an AC generator through a flywheel to smooth out the lumps. Not tremendously efficient, but robust.
A large flywheel was tried as a short term storage/smoothing system on Fair Isle (Shetlands), which gets its power from a clever wind/diesel system. The so-called "Kinetic Energy Storage System" [KESS] engineered by BP worked in testing, but was removed after liability worries if the bearings seized. Last I saw of the KESS's kevlar-composite case, it was being used as an attractive flowerpot by one of the islanders.