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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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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?
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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.
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); }
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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!
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.
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.
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!
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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.
So, in this case, I think it is a fair assessment that nearly all first posts that are not on topic are deemed flamebait, troll, or overrated. Would you not agree? So being first is bad timing... Word to being the sacrificial lamb!
Actually, you have to do this for another reason too; it would be pretty hard to change the direction the satellite is pointing at with a flywheel (gyro) spinning inside it. Put two flywheels spinning in the opposite direction of each other, and the effects pretty much cancel each other out.
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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.
Scientific American had an issue dedicated to hybrid automobiles a few years back (I'm too lazy to look up the issue, though I did check their on-line archives -- not there) and there was an article about a research team that designed and built a car with a high-tech flywheel.
It was a really cool car. It actually used a small jet turbine as the primary power source, because it's an extremely energy-efficient type of engine, but the slick part was the flywheel. In order to make sure the flywheel would hold a "charge" for a long time, they tried to make it completely frictionless. The flywheel didn't have any mechanical supports at all; it rested on a magnetic field inside a vacuum-filled spherical enclosure. A magnetized arm that rotated around the enclosure was used to accelerate and slow the flywheel.
They said when the flywheel was up to full speed, it would take several months to spin down. The main downside of the flywheel was weight, not only of the wheel itself, but also of its enclosure. The wheel was obviously designed to store a lot of kinetic energy, and the designers worried about what would happen if the enclosure were cracked open during an accident, so they designed it to withstand incredible forces.
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In reality, when I was in the military (DEC PDP11/35 era/pre IBM PC) we ran off a rotary no break. It had a motor, generator, big electric clutch, and diesel engine. It was the least reliable UPS we had. The problem was related to the big fan load on the system. When the flywheel was used to start the generator after an outage of 5-6 AC cycles, the speed became low quickly causing the inertia of the fan load to reverse current the system while starting the engine. After the engine started, the current by the slowed fans combined with the voltage sag (frequency about 50-55 HZ) from the slow generator tended to drop things offline as overcurrent protection operated, which then spiked the system. Most 60 HZ motors tend to draw lots more current at 50 HZ. To make matters worse, sometimes the engine didn't start right away.
The best system we had was a fulltime UPS (not standby) with about 20 minutes of battery backed by 4 conventional standby generators. The UPS was online all the time, not a standby UPS. This provided excelent spike protection. It was handeled by the battery charger and battery bank. There was no voltage or frequency changes during an outage. It simply worked. It had two banks of batteries so the batteries could be changed without shutting down. I remember the battery room. Rows and rows of 2 volt cells in fiberglass racks connected to produce 300 volts and fused at 900 amps. To check the water, you needed to break up the groups to 25 cell blocks with switches. About once a year a bank of batteries was deep cycled to test for capacity and all terminal connections were cleaned and checked.
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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
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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 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
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.
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?" `":" #");}
...how often do I have to change the hamster?
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