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NYC Subways Testing Flywheels
socolow writes "The New York Times (free registration required) has an article about the NYC subway system's use of flywheels to store the braking energy of trains approaching stations. Not only does this advance the development of flywheel energy storage, but it will help relieve a lot of the heat subways generate (always appreciated during the summer)."
Rather, they should slow down a little bit while people on the platforms run on moving sidewalks. The people on the sidewalks, once they reach and adequate speed, can jump on board the trains. This would just speed up things for everyone.
if they taper to a smaller edge along the outside edge of the flywheel, if they taper to thicker along the outside edge compared to the inside edge they flywheel apart causeing many distractions among the people that happen to be looking at the time
Is this the real story?
Why not just use regenerative braking.
Aren't they already electric?
It is probaly easier to implement (mechanically) and less additional weight on the subway.
After the power outages a couple weeks ago (most of Lower Manhattan was affected), it was starting to feel a little too much like California, if you ask me.
Seriously, flywheels are a really cool energy storage technique. They are a little scary when you consider the damage that a giant, heavy disk spinning very quickly could do in the event of a collision, but that is a small price to pay with the cost of energy so high these days.
When can I get one in my car?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Now if they just make the flywheel out of a superconductor, then not only will it store energy, but the train will be weightless!!!
Boeing, get on it!
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
sPh
Since the flywheels are just great big gyroscopes, what happens when the train makes a sharp turn?
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
I would like to ask if it would be possible to have a preference option that says "No stories with a New York Times link" in them - I refuse to register, I refuse to play games to work around registering, and therefor any /. story where the bulk of the information is on a NYT-hosted page is useless to me, unless/until somebody posts the article contents. And since I'd like not to encourage karma-whoring and copyright violation, I'd sooner just remove such stories.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Here's a user account I created to see this article at NY times without everyone having to register: username: slashdot2233 password: slashdot I'd hate to see anyone posting without having actually read the article. ;-)
Wired ran an article about the new flywheels a while ago.
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what???
Unfortunately, it takes 45 minutes of winding for 4-5 seconds of run time.
the title says it all.
Play the stock market drinking game!
tcd004
Before the visit ended the other day, a final question had to be asked: What is the purpose of the floating ping-pong ball?
"Oh that?" Mr. Lobenstein smiled like a child. "That's just to amuse us. Sometimes we get bored."
I have read about fly wheels for a few years now. They are amazingly interesting. I really hope they are used more places. The use of flywheels in this type of situationw ill help push the technology further. Besides uses for trains and mobile towers where else have flywheels already been put to use? I heard NASA would be using some? Does anyone beleive flywheels will eventually be the solution to the terrible battery storage? Could flywheels be used in electric hybrid cars instead of 1000 lbs of batteries? Long live the flywheel and i hope this technology finds its place in every day uses.
Dan Mayer: my blog, essays, art, etc
I believe thats what they are doing, except they are using flywheel batteries to store the electricity generated during braking.
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Didn't Arthur C. Clarke describe something like this in "The City and the Stars?" It's been a long time since I read it, but I believe that they had a transportation system that was essentially a wide moving sidewalk; the closer to the middle you moved, the faster it went.
Just in case anyone is too lazy to go read it, here's the content of the article:
The people who ensure that electric power is supplied constantly and consistently to the New York City subway get very little attention.
Track work somehow seems more honest -- the hoisting of heavy rails and traversing of dark tunnels. Water work seems more daring -- inflatable skiffs and scuba gear dispatched to save the system from sure inundation. Even motormen and conductors are figures of stoic romance, captaining their 400-ton trains above and below the city.
Try as you might, it is just not as easy to summon that kind of interest in a guy with a pair of alligator clips and an ohmmeter, poring over a schematic of a circuit breaker.
Then again, if it were not for that guy and the 650 volts of direct current that he knows how to dispatch through the third rail, miles of tracks and yards full of subway trains would amount to nothing more than ornamented chunks of steel.
So when an invitation was extended recently to visit a secluded stretch of land along Jamaica Bay, for a peek at what was described as "this incredible new gadget that the power guys are working on," a visit was dutifully paid.
The subway rarely conjures up images of high technology. But in a cinder-block barn near the jet path of Kennedy International Airport, the subway's chief electricians were presiding over something that looked like some kind of miniature mission control, much more rocket science than railroading.
On a desk sat a flat-panel computer screen, covered with numbers and graph patterns and colored lines. In front of the computer sat 10 whirring metal boxes slightly larger than refrigerators, a ping-pong ball levitating mysteriously in an updraft of air above one of them.
At the desk sat Robert W. Lobenstein -- Loby to his friends -- with a radio in his hand and a look of excitement on his face that only someone with an engineering degree can have.
"Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one," he called into his radio. "Full acceleration southbound!"
Despite the distant roar, Mr. Lobenstein, the general superintendent of power operations for the subway, was not launching a shuttle. He was launching a train -- one of the brand-new models starting to appear now on the L line -- along a 10,000-foot test track just outside the barn.
The train and the big metal boxes inside the barn were conspiring to do something that had never been done regularly in the subway. Since the subway first opened, trains have had a one-way relationship with the third rail: they take power from it. (During peak demand, in fact, subways and commuter trains use 600 million watts, enough energy to supply all the homes in Birmingham, Ala.)
But now, harnessing the mass and momentum of the new train cars, the subway's electricians are trying to strike up a better relationship between train and rail. In theory, it works like this: A moving train consumes power. When it stops, however, it can use its motor as a generator and pump some of that power back into the third rail, to be consumed by other trains around it.
The only problem is that when the power goes back into the rail, it is quickly eaten up by the resistance of the metal. So if other trains are not close by, to scoop up the power, the extra electricity dissipates like so many ripples in a pool.
Last summer, transit electricians and officials at the New York Power Authority, which supplies the third-rail, figured out a way to fix that. It was not a radically new idea, nor did it employ especially new technology. But finding anything to fix a problem in a place as huge as the subway is always a big job.
The solution: a battery.
A very, very big battery. Or, to be more accurate, 10 of them, each weighing as much as a Volkswagen Bug and together able to store up to a million watts of power.
A chemical battery, even the biggest around, could not handle this job. So the electricians harnessed a different kind, called a flywheel, which takes electrical energy and converts it to mechanical energy, using a rotating magnetic mass that spins up to 36,000 revolutions per minute.
For the last several weeks, through countless countdowns and test runs, the flywheels have been working like sponges, successfully absorbing the extra energy put out by a braking train. Or, as Robert Schmitt, another transit electrical official, put it, excitedly: "They're sitting here, saying: `Give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me!' "
And after taking, they have also been giving -- sensing that a train is accelerating and releasing the extra power to help it speed up.
Now, instead of a ragged green line on the computer screen, showing power dips and spikes, the lines have begun to smoothe out nicely. This makes electricians very happy.
Should the batteries be expanded to the whole subway system, they could also make accountants very happy, saving up to $20 million a year in electricity costs.
Before the visit ended the other day, a final question had to be asked: What is the purpose of the floating ping-pong ball?
"Oh, that?" Mr. Lobenstein smiled like a child. "That's just to amuse us. Sometimes, we got bored."
# fuser -v
#
I still think my hamster could spin a wheel faster than some dumb fly.
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regenerative braking, not sure what technologies are used by it.
If you drive a car with a manual transmission the flywheel is connected directly to crankshaft at the engine. The clutch then rubs up against the flywheel to transfer power through the transmission to the wheels.
Anybody know who made the flywheels? There are only a few flywheel companies in business, for example Beacon Power (BCON)--but they are concentrating on other applications.
Hmmm the heat has little to do with the electric motors, and much more to do with Air Conditioned Subway cars. The heat in the cars has to go somewhere so it (and some energy involved in moving it) goes out into the tunnels and the stations. Suposedly before A/C the cars were hot but the stations were cool(as one would expect for what is bassicaly a basement.)
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
The modifications to the trains are actually significant to support this, but it's about how the braking systems work and how the motor controllers work on the trains. There are a class of motor controllers that are not really compatible with regenerative braking, and they are fairly commonly used since they are cheaper than the others. The conversion to regenerative braking may involve replacing a fair bit of gear on the rolling stock. They were considering this kind of thing in San Diego, which is where I picked up lots of this trivia.
Many rail systems and streetcar systems have regenerative braking, but frequently they don't store the energy. What they do is have one unit braking while another is accellerating, so the excess power is in effect transferred via the wire to the other vehicle. Think of cable car systems where the guy at the top of the hill counterbalances the one at the bottom. This is hard to make work though, the timing issues being what they are.
My $.02
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Jack not name, jack job!
can we hook up our cell phone cranks to the subway flywheel?
That tech support that does not kill me...drives me crazier
From the out_of_the_topic dept.
If you dont wanna register at NYTimes visit NYT Random Login Generator
But because NYTimes block based on referrers you got two chances 1 - Disable Javascript or a better one get Multizilla Toolbar for Mozilla
It has a nice option like "Dont send referrer" .
Choose it and boom you are in !
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Or, as Robert Schmitt, another transit electrical official, put it, excitedly: "They're sitting here, saying: `Give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me!'
Ok, this guy needs to get laid. Now.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Now, if they could just do something about the smell. The Broadway-Fulton-Nassau station certainly gets rank in the summer.
Save the planet. Vote NO on flywheels.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
and a million watts is a lot of power.
Let's hope those flywheels are enclosed in something pretty solid.
Storing that much energy is one thing. Accidentally releasing it is another. When I was a student at MIT there was a permanent display in a glass case in the hallway of the biology department showing a centrifuge rotor that exploded, just to remind everyone of what happens when something spins too fast.
Let's also hope there's something to muffle that 600 Hz whine (which is close to the peak of human hearing sensitivity).
And I thought the wheels on Boston's Green Line screeching when going around sharp turns was bad...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Did the NYT defeat the random account generator? It no longer seems to work for me which is extremely disappointing. My personal information is far more valuable than the right to read a few newspaper articles. (Really, how does one weigh intimate knowledge to a few quarters?)
Why bother.
Related to this is the Parry People Mover which has been developed by a small company in Wales. This is designed as a light urban tansit system using flywheel to run the "people movers". The flywheels in these lightweight cars are recharged by either onboard LPG internal combustion engines or by electric motors fed from recharging points at stations.
They have been trialed on the Welsh Highland Railway and on the island of Mauritius omngst several other schemes - a quick Google search will turn up a lot more information about some of the trials.
While not a total success it is good to see innovation in this area.
Sailing over the event horizon
Right here A very good article (with illustrations) that tells how flywheels work and store energy. Pretty neat stuff.
If the flywheel is mounted horizontally, i.e. like a record player, then the turning would have no noticeable effect.
Might have problems if you wanna loop-the-loop though.
OT bit: You know, its really fscking annoying seeing one of those "cool ideas you think of when bored" appear for real.
I'm still working on the linear gearbox.
Ali
Ph33r m3!!!
What about the homeless people who rely on the subway heat vents in the winter?
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schweet.
I personally love the idea of using flywheels to store energy in this manner -- it seems very elegant to simply transfer the energy into rotational motion, rather than simply losing it all as heat.
There's one safety concern I have that I haven't yet seen addressed, though I've probably just missed it. If a flywheel is spinning at several tens of thousands of RPM (such as the 36,000 RPM flywheel mentioned in the story), what happens if the flywheel's physical supports are damaged or destroyed?
Basically, let's say a truck crashes into the building storing a spinning flywheel. The flywheel's housing is hit and breaks, putting the flywheel into physical contact with other materials. What happens? I have visions of a thousand-kilo ceramic disc either spinning off like the Tazmanian Devil, leaving a disc-shaped cartoon hole in whatever it encounters, or shattering upon impact and spraying shards of material at hundreds of meters per second in sundry directions.
The problem is, I don't know if this is actually true or not. Can anyone with an actual knowledge of such things answer? Thanks.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Here is what you need to know about flywheels, and I mean REAL FLYWHEELS, which are awesome.
Facts.
- Flywheels SPIN with ULTIMATE POWER.
- Flywheels spin ALL the time.
- The purpose of flywheels is to flip out and POWER things with REAL ULTIMATE POWER.
Flywheels are cool. And by cool, I mean totally sweet. Here are some more things you should know about flywheels.Real Ultimate Power
Flywheels are huge and heavy. They turn with ULTIMATE POWER. They don't quit.
Here are a flywheel's weapons:
- Flywheel.
- REAL ULTIMATE POWER.
Don't even compare a flywheel to a battery. If you compare it to a battery, you will DIE because flywheels have REAL ULTIMATE POWER, not like batteries you put in a laptop or something, and let me tell you they WILL kill you if you piss them off, and they won't even think twice about it.Testimonial:
Flywheels are dangerous and they don't have any problems with doing anything they want. They cut people's heads off just because they didn't ask them if they wanted fries. Flywheels are so crazy and awesome that they flip out ALL the time. I heard that there was this flywheel at the olympics, and there was rain so they made the events be put off until the next day and the flywheel FLIPPED OUT and destroyed the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. That's REAL ULTIMATE POWER.
My friend Mark said that he saw a flywheel totally uppercut some old lady just because she fell out of a window.
And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you don't believe that flywheels have REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or they will chop your head off!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.
Flywheels are sooooooooooo sweet that I almost crapped my pants. I can't believe it sometimes, but I feel it every day of my life. Flywheels are totally awesome and that's a fact. Flywheels are fast, smooth, cool, strong, powerful, and sweet. Fact. I can't wait to start mechanical engineering in a month. I love flywheels with all of my body (including parts I haven't gotten to use yet).
Q and A:.
Q: Why is everyone so obsessed about flywheels?
A: Flywheels are the ultimate paradox. On the one hand they don't give a crap, but on the other hand, flywheels are very careful and precise and they WILL kill you.
Q: I heard that flywheels are always cruel or mean. What's their problem?
A: Whoever told you that is a total liar. Just like other machinery, flywheels can be mean OR totally awesome. But they WILL kill you if you piss them off.
Q: What do flywheels do when they're not cutting off heads or flipping out?
A: Most of their free time is spent spinning, but sometime they shoot lightning. (Ask Mark if you don't believe me.)
I had a picture of my best friend Mark showing his flywheel off but we had to take it down because of the flywheels. Let me tell you: you don't want to mess with a flywheel. These guys have REAL ULTIMATE POWER.
Trust me. You can ask Mark, he'll tell you too.
Of course, I don't recommend loop the loops, and the CrossRoads of Danger(TM) would have to go.
The cool cardboard desert backgrounds and grandstands could stay, though. And the orange plastic track would make an excellent subway defense weapon!
"Mom, he's beating me with the track again!" "Well, hit him back, I'm busy!"
The Wired article made me wonder about the probabilty of using a flywheel for a UPS? Any thoughts? Seems simple enough - get a heavy wheel on a decent bearing train and connect to a small motor that can eventually spin it up to high RPM and then use an electric clutch to keep it DISengaged from a generator. Add a really small UPS to cover the switch over time and viola! As soon as the power fails, the clutch engages the flywheel to generate power for 15+ minutes (enough time to perform a clean shut down). I like it....
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
http://www.screenbert.com/ntimes/rail.htm
A good break down of Power vs. Energy located here . Not here.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
I love the NYC Subway system. It smells bad at times, but its an engineering marvel. So many people, tunnels, electrical, mechanical systems. a good website is http://www.nycsubway.org
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Here's a mirror of the story - (no registration needed!) /.ers
Enjoy fellow
"when the power goes back into the rail, it is quickly eaten up by the resistance of the metal. So if other trains are not close by, to scoop up the power, the extra electricity dissipates like so many ripples in a pool."
eaten up??? I'm laughing thinking of the interview that this reporter must have had with the Power Authority guys.
"store up to a million watts of power."
NO!
power=energy/time
you can store ENERGY, not power.
Effectively this is like a big capacitor. I surmise a chemical battery would have issues with constant discharge/recharge. Whereas a flywheel couldn't care less.
:D
The flywheels could not go in the train because the bumpy ride would continuously siphon off power, and you know power siphoned off would be in the form of heat. Not to mention that each battery weighs as a small volkswagen
Their solution to the voltage loss in the 3rd rail is a half-assed one. They claim the distance between the trains would cause too much loss in the line if they tried to transmit power back across it. Yet they are still transmiting power across it anyway?!? They must plan on the average distange between a train and the battery station to be smaller than between a train and another train, though the article strangely failed to say.
I really didnt enjoy 1/2 the article being fluff about the lack of glory in being a transit engineer...
Maybe the LA County MTA can take a few hints from these guys on the Metro Rail. Or for that matter, any mass transit system using rails.
This sig no verb.
I hate to sound like a weenie and say "ME TOO", but I STRONGLY second this request.
I supect that posting this as a comment isnt enough to get it to the person thats posting these though.
If you cant post a link that displays the story, then dont post anything at all.
I'm not lazy at all. I simply have no desire to support the idiotic practice of web publishers trying to mine my information in return for content. If the content is truly free, then it is free. If the cost of the content is "We sell your contact info, and you get the unholy excrement spammed out of your email account", then the price is too high - I refuse to pay. And since I also prefer not to lie, I choose not to enter garbage, but rather simply not go to the site.
And unlike the many folks who will bitch every time a NYT story is submitted, I simply asked for the ability to make my own choice about whether I would see such stories. I don't ask that others be prevented from seeing them - I don't berate the story poster for linking to NYT. I simply ask that the same sort of choice that I can make for Katz, MS or YRO stories be extended to NYT registration required stories.
And I think the moderation history on my previous comment is itself hilarious. While I can whole-heartedly support the "Off-topic" mods, the Redundant moderation is quite amusing - were there any other posts expressing my sentiment? And the less said about those metamoderations posing as moderations (overrated and underrated) the better.
www.eFax.com are spammers
They'll put your eye out.
I understand the concept of harvesting braking to push a flywheel to greater speeds, therefore storing the energy, but I have a couple of questions:
Aren't flywheels tremendously heavy? Wouldn't the additional weight cause longer stopping distances, especially under emergency braking?
I do understand that the braking would be assisted by the flywheel itself (spinning it up), but you never get anything for free (See The First Law of Thermodynamics.). When spinning up the wheels, you'd have heat loss, and loss again when they are spun down. Secondly, again, because of the 1st Law, wouldn't the heat generated by all of those flywheels spinning up and down exactly equal the heat savings? Moreover, thinking of emergency braking - What is the top speed of the flywheels? How strong do the gears need to be to spin up the flywheel to top speed very quickly? And at what tremendous gear ratio?
Don't think that I'm against it, cause I'm not. I think the electricity savings alone make it worth the effort and expense, but I'm not convinced that the trains would be as safe as the existing ones, and that there would be any heat savings. That said, CA needs to convert the BART next....
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
The article says that the chief electricians were able to get a ping-pong ball to levitate!
Has anyone told Boeing yet?
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
36,000 RPM, thats more than eanough to blow up CD's. I wonder what they are made of.
Flywheels are overkill.
The New York Subway stations are currently elevated from the surrounding tunnels, so that a train slows down as it climbs into the station, and accelerates as it glides down out of the station. Real simple, no High Tech required, maybe not as interesting, though.
I was thinking the samething the bums are gonna all freeze to death.
...to the conservation bomb.
Pretty fly, for a white guy.
t ml
Give it to me baby, uh-huh uh-huh!
http://www.offspring.com/lyrics/lyrics_amr_pf.h
Both require some physical agility, and are rarely seen today.
http://web.mit.edu/charliew/www/centrifuge.html
When I was poking around flywheel development a while back (wasn't the company Slashdotted once?), I found Beacon Power does exactly this; they do institutional UPSes, and the wheels get buried into a proper chamber. Someone else in this thread pointed out they'll be doing this for the subway as well; there are issues there because it's a multi-layer system without a lot of "ground" between some levels, but as long as they design the walls of the chamber thick enough to contain any ablation in a detonation event, there won't be any risk to the structure of the subway that won't be revealed on installation.... (Meaning, you dig a hole in the subway, and put in a reallly thick chamber; if the subway doesn't collapse from the hole you dug, you're good to go.)
MOD PARENT UP!!!! FUNNY +5!
Most of the warmth in the subways is caused by heat that has been absorbed by the roadbeds above radiating downward into the stations, to a lesser degree by the exhaust of the air conditioning on subway cars, and to a still smaller degree by steam tunnels that border some of the tunnels and run in parallel conduits. Not by braking trains.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
What about the homeless people who rely on the subway heat vents in the winter?
They will provide the lubrication.
It's not about lying on the form, fuck head. True, I don't want them to have correct information. The crux of the issue is that I do not feel like taking the time to fill-out 20+ fields of nonsense, then go back and correct it repeatedly when it says "your ZIP/email/state/whatever is invalid".
As for personal information, spam is not the issue. NYT doesn't need to know my gender, age, region, etc. It's an issue of privacy.
Why bother.
Well, maybe the next time the cops offer them a spot at the shelter, they won't turn it down. Police and social services go out every night and round up the homeless so they don't freeze to death. Some of the homeless prefer a subway grate to the shelters and if they're not obviously nuts, the police have to let them do it. 1/3 of the homeless population is mentally ill.
It's illegal to be homeless in New York City.
Don't believe me? Want to mod me down? Go ahead, just don't try to not have a job or a home or any money in NY, otherwise they'll throw you in jail.
[o]_O
A very, very big battery. Or, to be more accurate, 10 of them, each weighing as much as a Volkswagen Bug and together able to store up to a million watts of power.
Are we to take this article seriously, or to believe anything it says? If they do not know the difference between power and energy, there is no telling what else in the article may be untrue.
The large ferris wheel in London doesn't stop, but it is only going at slow walking pace and there are people to assist wheelchair bound should they require it, but many "handicapped" people would push you under the train rather than accept that they "need your help".
... of course they can, you just have to make sure it is designed so that everyone (or as near as damn it) can travel safely and don't leave big gaps between cars for blind people to walk into etc. Flexible material to cover those gaps is used in many countries, but not in the UK ...
Many airports have travelling walkways and I've seen all sorts of "uncoordinated" people on them (I've even bumped into a couple of them, which makes me wonder who is the more uncoordinated!)
Might as well say that blind people can't travel on the existing system
I agree with the parent.
I'm just not going to register.
The IP of the NYT random login generator has been blocked, and I don't feel like using some huge group account that some jerk will change the password on.
I don't like giving websites personally identifying data unless it's for a decent reason and I trust the website. And I don't want to bother remembering whatever bogus login I generate.
It would be really nice to be able to shut off all NYT stories. How about an option to not see any stories where you can't just click the link and see the story? I already have fifty or so username:password combinations to remeber and I'd rather not have to deal with any more.
Life is too short to proofread.
The use of flywheels and/or regenerative braking will do much to improve the energy efficiency of subway trains, but will do little to improve subway comfort.
...) into the outside envronment as is heat from the hot coils of the heat pump. This is what makes the enclosed environment of the subway intolerable.
The heat generated during a trains accelleration was nearly eliminated when the resistive motor controls formerly used were replaced with energy efficient solid-state chopper controls. The heat generated from the use of the motors in the braking cycle is considerably less - most of the braking being mechanical.
The problem is subway discomfort is another modern technology - air conditioning.
Air heated by the hot, sweaty, sardine packed passengers, from the doors opening and closing and thermal (exterior heat and sun) load on the train is passed through the cold coils of a heat pump and then over electric heating coils to raise its temperature (dehumidifying it) and then passed back into the train.
All this heat and humidity has to go somewhere.
Humidity removed from the air is dumped (drip drip drip
When the Subways were being built in the early 1900's extensive studies, testing and engineering changes were done to ensure passenger comfort. I can remember the pleasure of riding the subways at the open front gratings on the trains - soaking up the COOL breaze as the train rushed through the subway.
When air conditioning was introduced the trains became cooler but the stations became intolerable. The answer then was to increase the ventilation of the subway to allow all this additional heat to escape. However, opening up the subways to vent the heat resulted in the subways being COLD in the winter and even Hotter in the summer.
Technology, go figure. Like the Victorians - we're Throughly Modern (tm) ! But have we advanced ?
Anyone out there have an answer to this?
Each flywheel gave steady 25 horespower and could double that for short kicks. Four would drive a car, but you could fit about 16 in an engine compartment (don't need engine, transmission, etc). That's 400 horsepower, and if you floor it you get 800 instantly! Also they would take you about 300 miles on a spin-up, which was accomplished by plugging the car into a wall socket, revving up the wheels with an electric motor - a charge would cost about 6 dollars of electricity.
Flywheels are better than batteries in a lot of ways. I'm glad to see they are finally being used for commercial applications. I haven't heard anything about the automobile flywheel guy since, but I'm sure his work won't be for nought. I'm equally sure car manufacturers and oil companies would stop him flat if he tried to market it though.
http://www.discover.com/search/index.html
You can search for it here with 'flywheel' as keyword - article name is 'Reinventing the Wheel'.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
GOATSE BOMB!!!... Do not click>>>
Don't ask us, ask them. It's their problem.
I saw this figure mentioned in the boeing article as well. I don't understand where it comes from.
If an object sitting on the ground were to no longer feel the earth's gravitational pull, I don't think that it will fly up into the air. At first, it would just hover up against the ground. It would continue moving at ~1050mph (the tangential velocity of an object on the earth's surface) in the direction it was moving when the gravity stoped. It's like if you were to stand on the edge of a fast moving merry-go-round, and slip off. In the first few instants, you would have almost no speed relative to the ride, but you would continue going the same speed that you were before, in the same direction. If you were to continue flying away for some time, the greatest speed relative to the center of the ride would be the origional tangential speed. In the case of the earth, that's ~1050 mph.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
See here: Rotary Converters Very cool info about 1900-era technology used to convert AC to DC power for use on the subway lines.
is a way kewl idea. Now about that Russian's anti-gravity bit that Boeing just picked up on, maybe we could just float around on the platform while we wait for the next train :)
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
Something the article does not state... A system like this can make a major difference in the power cost. Big commercial consumers pay based on their *peak* power draw (at least in CA). If you can reduce the peak draw, you change your costs for your entire usage. Cost/megawatt is significantly higer on a 600Amp peak circuit than it is on a 300Amp peak draw circuit. Major major difference, especially when multiplying that across the entire system.
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Jack not name, jack job!
When can I get this in my notebook? Combined with the Transmeta processor, I could probably get 30 hours out it instead of the 15 I get now!
Of course, it'd probably be a bit heavier, and if the flywheel broke, I wouldn't want my notebook to explode.
I was thinking about this the other day, when signing up for some similar site: I thought the WTC used to have their own ZIP code(s). I was too lazy to look them up to use them, but I wonder if they would have worked.
Out of morbid couriosity, has anybody researched using fast flywheels as weapons?
Table-ized A.I.
Did Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" roads use conveyer belts? That was a Nation-wide system of conveyer belts that moved people from city to city, I think. The story was about the engineers that maintained them. Heinlein was the only guy who ever made the work of (us) engineers sound exciting. ("I'll keep those transistors humming, if it's the last thing I do, golldarnit!") Maybe cuz he was one.
Have fun, MadDad32
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Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
oops, forgot the paragraphs:
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sorry!
I seem to recall reading many years ago about testing on a bus that had a flywheel for regenerative breaking (in Scandinavia IIRC). The main problem with it was the gyroscope effect - trying to turn left or right creates a force at ninety degrees (ie up or down) and this proved too much for the suspension to deal with. Guess it's less of an issue with a subway train...?
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Amusingly enough, there is a subway in Cincinnati. Well, about three or four stations worth, anyway. They started construction on it in the 70s, ran out of money, and never completed it.
More details here.
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Whoever modded this "offtopic" has clearly never been on a New York City subway train.
"The Roads Must Roll"
by Robert Heinlein c1940
First scifi I know of mentioning moving sidewalks.
Great read if you can find it - it's in Science Fiction Hall of Fame volume I, but that's out of print.
If the subways was built with the stations placed higher than the track, then the trains would store some energy within them self.
Can someone do the Math please?
First of all, I trust any website that displays the TRUSTe logo approximately as far as I can urinate into a strong Kansas wind - all TRUSTe says is "we have a policy", that policy might be "We sell your address to everybody with five cents" and you can still get a TRUSTe logo. Additionally, TRUSTe is unwilling to revoke a logo once given, so it is essentially meaningless.
/. to reflect my desires.
Second, the stated goal of the NYT registration is to garner better demographics for their advertising - in other words, by looking at the data they have on me, they try to ram the ads down my throat that have the highest chance of making buy something - something I in all probability wasn't planning on buying. I dislike such things - why should I support them?
Again, I don't wish to tell others how to go about their lives - but I choose to neither help nor hinder this sort of "targeted advertising", and I'd like to be able to configure
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Since the flywheel has a vertical axis... nothing. However, if the train corners quickly enough to cause a rollover, the flywheel would act to prevent the train from tipping.
Uh, last time I rode the NY subway, it was about 50 feet underneath the streats. I think you'd have to drop that truck from about 10,000 feet up to get it to penetrate that far underground... and then I suspect the truck would do a lot more damage than the flywheel.
They use DC for the same reasons that elevators use DC..smooth braking and acceleration.... Also, DC is necessary because as part of the power distribution there are 'breaks' in the third rail...and the rail actually uses the car to complete the break. An AC system would have to maintain phase scycronization for this to work.
I work for the Automation and Controls department of a very large company and we are exploring this technology. This is a very real problem, but the solution is pretty easy. Instead of using just one large flywheel, use many smaller ones.
There's an idea. Just make the smaller flywheels, the size of, um, TURNSTILES.....
What about the homeless people who rely on the subway heat vents in the winter?
They actually hang out near the steam vents so it's not really a problem. I live near a co-generation plant so there are a few extra citizens on cold winter days around here.
The thread reminded me that tomorrow I have to visit client's location. And that means waiting for the Q train on the 34th Street station. Dammit, standing there in the heat and watching a few hundred people suffering just like yourself. Truly depressing... a perfect fit for NYC.
... and I'm thinking about all these drunk people never going home, and some Guinness world records being set for party length and alcohol consumption.
They need to have this.
I'm not sure which of the noises you are talking about but I agree with you!
It's kinda like a forced upgrade
The new trains like those that operate on the 6 line actually drown out a lot of the track noise and have less jumpy/noisy ractions to track imperfections, right? However, whatever it is, their new turbine-like humming is very noisy, though it sounds more like something between 440+ and 512- Hz (near the key of B). The train ride is more comfortable, but I have found it hard to talk to girls because the noise drowns out their voices. The loud whine starts up as soon as the train accelerates and I have not heard it inside or outside the older trains (A, B and D, older 4 models, etc)
I hope someone notices the whine before the state spends millions replacing the trains that didn't have that 'feature.'
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In the city Arnhem (in the Netherlands), there are (amongst others) trolley's providing the public transport. All these trolleys have a flywheel storing their energy....so what's the big deal? It's nothing new, Arnhem has been doing it for years now!
And NO: no serious accidents were ever caused by the presence of the flywheel, no problems taking a sharp curve.
Story goes that the flywheel takes 5 mins. to come up to full speed.
No most of the heat really comes from the brakes. I live in Montreal and here we do not have A/C (it would really be a total waste since there's about 20 very hot summer days per year here). The subway is also much deeper in the ground than in NY (it usually takes you two big escalators to get to the subway cars, sometimes three). And on the very hot summer day, it is also very hot in the subway (almost unbearable in some station). In fact, some people fainted the very first year . They had to add fans to push air in so it get cooler.