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Determination of Moment of Inertia & Radius of Gyration of Flywheel (Part – III) 

In the 1950s flywheel-powered buses, known as gyrobuses, were used in Yverdon, Switzerland, and there is ongoing research to make flywheel systems that are smaller, lighter, cheaper, and have a greater capacity. It is hoped that flywheel systems can replace conventional chemical batteries for mobile applications, such as for electric vehicles. Proposed flywheel systems would eliminate many of the disadvantages of existing battery power systems, such as low capacity, long charge times, heavy weight, and short usable lifetimes. Flywheel systems have also been used experimentally in small electric locomotives for shunting or switching.

In the 1980s Soviet engineer Nourbey Gulia had been working on flywheel energy storage. His work resulted in many original solutions for wheel suspension, sealing the vacuum chamber, rotation rate decline compensator and hydraulic transmission. However, the primary advance was the composite flywheel capable of rotation rates exceeding 40,000 rpm, running for up to a week when not loaded, and resistant to explosive destruction. Gulia's "super flywheels" were tightly wound of metal or plastic tape. These had tensile strength higher than that of molded steel, and in the case of failure simply unwound inside the chamber, filling it and grinding to a stop. Gulia's first wheels were made of steel tape, but the latest models used Kevlar filament, wound not unlike a bobbin of thread.

Flywheel power storage systems in current production (2001) have storage capacities comparable to batteries and faster discharge rates. They are mainly used to provide load leveling for large battery systems, such as an uninterruptible power supply. Developers of such flywheel energy storage systems include Hitec Power Protection, Active Power, AFS Trinity and Beacon Power.

A long-standing niche market for flywheel power systems is facilities where circuit-breakers and similar devices are tested: even a small household circuit-breaker may be rated to interrupt a current of 10,000 or more amps, and larger units may be have interrupting ratings of 100,000 or 1,000,000 amps. Obviously the enormous transient loads produced by deliberately forcing such devices to demonstrate their ability to interrupt simulated short circuits would have unacceptable effects on the local grid if these tests were done directly off building power. So typically such a laboratory will have several large motor-generator sets, which can be spun-up to speed over some minutes; then the motor is disconnected before a circuit-breaker is tested.

Flywheels are not affected by temperature changes as are chemical batteries, nor do they suffer from memory effect. Moreover, they are not as limited in the amount of energy they can hold. They are also less potentially damaging to the environment, being made of largely inert or benign materials. Another advantage of flywheels is that by a simple measurement of the rotation speed it is possible to know the exact amount of energy stored. However, use of flywheel accumulators is currently hampered by the danger of explosive shattering of the massive wheel due to overload.

One of the primary limits to flywheel design is the tensile strength of the material used for the rotor. Generally speaking, the stronger the disc, the faster it may be spun, and the more energy the system can store. When the tensile strength of a flywheel is exceeded the flywheel will shatter, releasing all of its stored energy at once; this is commonly referred to as "flywheel explosion" since wheel fragments can reach kinetic energy comparable to that of a bullet. Consequently, traditional flywheel systems require strong containment vessels as a safety precaution, which increases the total mass of the device. Fortunately, composite materials tend to disintegrate quickly once broken, and so instead of large chunks of high-velocity shrapnel one simply gets a containment vessel filled with red-hot sand (still, many customers of modern flywheel power storage systems prefer to have them embedded in the ground to halt any material that might escape the containment vessel). Gulia's tape flywheels did not require a heavy container and reportedly could be rewound and reused after a tape fracture.

When used in vehicles, flywheels also act as gyroscopes, since their angular momentum is typically of a similar order of magnitude as the forces acting on the moving vehicle. This property may be detrimental to the vehicle's handling characteristics while turning. On the other hand, this property could be utilised to improve stability in curves. Two externally joined flywheels spinning synchronously in opposite directions would have a total angular momentum of zero and no gyroscopic effect.

Compiled by Samar Das