Everything about Flywheel totally explained
A
flywheel is a rotating disc used as a storage device for
kinetic energy. Flywheels resist changes in their
rotational speed, which helps steady the rotation of the shaft when a fluctuating
torque is exerted on it by its power source such as a
piston-based (
reciprocating)
engine, or when the load placed on it's intermittent (such as a piston
pump). Flywheels can be used to produce very high power pulses as needed for some experiments, where drawing the power from the public network would produce unacceptable spikes. A small motor can accelerate the flywheel between the pulses. Recently, flywheels have become the subject of extensive research as power storage devices for uses in vehicles; see
flywheel energy storage.
Physics
Energy is stored in the rotor as
kinetic energy, or more specifically,
rotational energy:
»
This parameter could be called the specific tensile strength. The flywheel material with the highest specific tensile strength will yield the highest energy storage. This is one reason why
carbon fiber is a material of interest.
Applications
precession has to be considered. A rotating flywheel responds to any momentum that tends to change the direction of its axis of rotation by a resulting precession rotation. A vehicle with a vertical-axis flywheel would experience a lateral momentum when passing the top of a hill or the bottom of a valley (
roll momentum in response to a pitch change). Two counter-rotating flywheels may be needed to eliminate this effect.
The flywheel has been used since ancient times, the most common traditional example being the
potter's wheel. In the
Industrial Revolution,
James Watt contributed to the development of the flywheel in the
steam engine, and his contemporary
James Pickard used a flywheel combined with a
crank to transform reciprocating into rotary motion.
In a more modern application, a
momentum wheel is a type of flywheel useful in satellite pointing operations, in which the flywheels are used to point the satellite's instruments in the correct directions without the use of thruster rockets.
Flywheels are used in
punching machines and
riveting machines where it stores energy from the motor and releases it during the main operation (punching and riveting).
History
The principle of the flywheel is already found in the Neolithic
spindle and the
potter's wheel.
The flywheel as a general mechanical device for equalizing the speed of rotation is first described in the
Kitab al-Filaha of the
Andalusian engineer Ibn Bassal (fl. 1038-1075), who applies the device in a
chain pump (saqiya) and
noria.
According to the American medievalist
Lynn Townsend White, Jr., such a flywheel is also recorded in the
De diversibus artibus (
On various arts) of the German artisan
Theophilus Presbyter (ca. 1070-1125), who records applying the device in several of his machines.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Flywheel'.
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