Gasoline explosions are limited by the amount of oxygen available.
Even in the worst case, a gas tank has a small amount of air in it relative to the the amount of gasoline. You still get a big boom, but that's just a tiny amount of gasoline vapour going off. The bulk of gasoline gets spread and burns.
The only way to get a gasoline to release all its energy is to mix it with air before you ignite it. It's called a fuel air bomb, and the US used them in Vietnam to carve out football field sized landing zones in dense forest.
Failure for a flywheel is anything that stops it from spinning. The only ones that can power a car spin in vacuums on magnetic bearings. Any breach in the vacuum, any contact between the flywheel and its casing, and things go bad real fast.
This doesn't mean flywheels are useless, it means that any flywheel needs to kept in a housing that can contain the energy of the wheel when it fails. The only flywheels in use are either buried in the ground or only used for small amounts of energy. Flywheel busses recharge every stop. Flywheel cars so far have really been hybrids that only use the wheel to store energy for active breaking.
The the active breaking systems for the NYTA trains do both -- they only store enough energy to smooth out the power transfer between breaking and accelarating trains, plus they are put in a big undeground room.
Demonstration systems that run a lightbulb for a few minutes are just that, toys.
The cranks who think flywheels can be scaled up to replace gasoline in cars -- or that you'd even want a kilowatt hour one in your laptop -- don't understand physics, and are flakes on top of that.
I can see you're having trouble grasping how diffently materials behave at the speeds a flywheel spins. A rubber ball, travelling close enough to the speed of light, will punch a hole through a thousand miles of titanium steel. A flywheel works the same way. Make it out of rubber, make it lint, it doesn't matter. It still has as much energy as the the fuel based system it replaces. And fuel packs an enormous amount of energy -- think of a fuel air bomb, or think 50 lbs of dynamite per gallon gasoline. "Soft" is totally irrelavent.
Thinking that making it out of rubber will make it any less dangerous reminds me of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he's falling off a cliff standing on Elmer Fudd. A foot from the ground he steps off Elmer and gently lands, while Elmer leaves a crater. After all, Bugs only fell 1 foot!
No matter what you make the flywheel out of, conservation of energy applies. All the energy you put into it must come out again. And when the system fails, it fails catastrophically.
As soon as the flywheel comes in contact with anything -- even air, for the small fast ones, it starts to heat like a meteor. Coat it with teflon, coat it with Astroglide, doesn't matter. That heat's got to go somewhere. Make it out of space shuttle tiles, for all the good it will do, its still going to melt, if not ablate or just vaporize. The center can not hold. Things fall apart.
You've got to throw away your intuition that "its just a spinning disk." It's a Tazmanian devil coated in a ball of plasma.
Just stop a while and think about something spinning with the energy of a thousand pounds of dynamite. Think.
When one fails, the energy has to go somewhere. You can wrap in kevlar, you can wrap it in a condom. 20 gal of gasoline = 1000 lb's of TNT isn't going to care.
As for NASA using them, their notion of safety is a little different -- they send people up in rockets, remember. They'd still be using plutonium for power up there if it weren't for public relations.
The problem with flywheels is that when they fail, they go like a stick of dynamite. Actually, the flywheel equivalent of your 20 gallon SUV gas tank is 280 sticks of dynamite.
Imagine your typical LA rush hour with 1 million cars bumper to bumper, all running off flywheels. A guy on his cell comes off an entrace at 60 an rear ends another car. It explodes. His car explodes. The cars next to them explode. Pretty soon you've got -- literally -- a 1 megaton explosion engulfing LA.
Other than that, flywheels can be made to work. You can run 2 wheels in opposite directions to cancel the angular momentum. You can put it all on magnetic bearings in a vacuum to eliminate the friction. You can make it as small and as powerful as you want.
But no matter what you do, when they fail, they release all their energy in the nastiest possible way. Simple conservation of energy.
Wait -- you could surround each flywheel with a cloud of microscopic black holes that would absorb the blast! It's so simple!
I'll believe that its not as trivial as just compiling to the native VLIW, but there should be something closer to the native instructions that still allows run-time optimizations.
To put it another way, if x86 didn't exist, and all you had was a Transmeta chip, would you really rediscover x86 as the optimal intermediary between C++ and the native VLIW?
I don't know much about Transmeta chips, but according to their web site:
"The Code Morphing software is designed to dynamically translate x86 instructions into VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) instructions for the underlying Crusoe hardware engine."
Why not compile Linux and its apps directly to VLIW instructions?
More generally, why not ignore the x86 and treat the Transmeta as its own architecture?
I expect the Code Morphing hardware can be used for more than x86 compatibility.
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Even in the worst case, a gas tank has a small amount of air in it relative to the the amount of gasoline. You still get a big boom, but that's just a tiny amount of gasoline vapour going off. The bulk of gasoline gets spread and burns.
The only way to get a gasoline to release all its energy is to mix it with air before you ignite it. It's called a fuel air bomb, and the US used them in Vietnam to carve out football field sized landing zones in dense forest.
Failure for a flywheel is anything that stops it from spinning. The only ones that can power a car spin in vacuums on magnetic bearings. Any breach in the vacuum, any contact between the flywheel and its casing, and things go bad real fast.
This doesn't mean flywheels are useless, it means that any flywheel needs to kept in a housing that can contain the energy of the wheel when it fails. The only flywheels in use are either buried in the ground or only used for small amounts of energy. Flywheel busses recharge every stop. Flywheel cars so far have really been hybrids that only use the wheel to store energy for active breaking.
The the active breaking systems for the NYTA trains do both -- they only store enough energy to smooth out the power transfer between breaking and accelarating trains, plus they are put in a big undeground room.
Demonstration systems that run a lightbulb for a few minutes are just that, toys.
The cranks who think flywheels can be scaled up to replace gasoline in cars -- or that you'd even want a kilowatt hour one in your laptop -- don't understand physics, and are flakes on top of that.
Just make an ethananol cell that drinks vodka from those little airplane bottles, and pray they don't cut you off after your 10th stoli.
Thinking that making it out of rubber will make it any less dangerous reminds me of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where he's falling off a cliff standing on Elmer Fudd. A foot from the ground he steps off Elmer and gently lands, while Elmer leaves a crater. After all, Bugs only fell 1 foot!
No matter what you make the flywheel out of, conservation of energy applies. All the energy you put into it must come out again. And when the system fails, it fails catastrophically.
As soon as the flywheel comes in contact with anything -- even air, for the small fast ones, it starts to heat like a meteor. Coat it with teflon, coat it with Astroglide, doesn't matter. That heat's got to go somewhere. Make it out of space shuttle tiles, for all the good it will do, its still going to melt, if not ablate or just vaporize. The center can not hold. Things fall apart.
You've got to throw away your intuition that "its just a spinning disk." It's a Tazmanian devil coated in a ball of plasma.
Just stop a while and think about something spinning with the energy of a thousand pounds of dynamite. Think.
As for NASA using them, their notion of safety is a little different -- they send people up in rockets, remember. They'd still be using plutonium for power up there if it weren't for public relations.
Imagine your typical LA rush hour with 1 million cars bumper to bumper, all running off flywheels. A guy on his cell comes off an entrace at 60 an rear ends another car. It explodes. His car explodes. The cars next to them explode. Pretty soon you've got -- literally -- a 1 megaton explosion engulfing LA.
Other than that, flywheels can be made to work. You can run 2 wheels in opposite directions to cancel the angular momentum. You can put it all on magnetic bearings in a vacuum to eliminate the friction. You can make it as small and as powerful as you want.
But no matter what you do, when they fail, they release all their energy in the nastiest possible way. Simple conservation of energy.
Wait -- you could surround each flywheel with a cloud of microscopic black holes that would absorb the blast! It's so simple!
I'll believe that its not as trivial as just compiling to the native VLIW, but there should be something closer to the native instructions that still allows run-time optimizations.
To put it another way, if x86 didn't exist, and all you had was a Transmeta chip, would you really rediscover x86 as the optimal intermediary between C++ and the native VLIW?
More generally, why not ignore the x86 and treat the Transmeta as its own architecture?
I expect the Code Morphing hardware can be used for more than x86 compatibility.