Taking economics and the setting into consideration, what’s one of the simplest ways to retailer a considerable amount of vitality? Trace: it isn’t an unlimited shed filled with Tesla Megapack batteries — they’re wildly costly and require a number of non-renewable assets to fabricate. Gravity batteries and pumped hydro storage are higher, as they will retailer kinetic vitality indefinitely with simply the mass of water or heavy stuff. Equally, you possibly can retailer kinetic vitality in a one thing spinning and that’s what a flywheel is. To reveal that, Erik constructed his personal flywheel battery utilizing water as weight.
Erik runs the Idea Crafted Creations YouTube channel and has posted a number of movies associated to physics and vitality. However this may simply be his most fascinating venture, as a result of this sort of battery is unknown to most individuals.
This can be a kind of kinetic battery, like a gravity battery or pumped hydro storage, besides it shops the kinetic vitality as rotational inertia in a spinning flywheel. That’s precisely what flywheels are for, however they often drive mechanisms. On this case, the flywheel offers electrical energy by turning a motor appearing as a dynamo — the identical motor that spins up the flywheel within the first place.
Erik’s venture is especially distinctive as a result of it makes use of water to weight the flywheel and the water accommodates can transfer out and in (relative to the axis of rotation) to lower the flywheel’s second of inertia. That’s like whenever you’re spinning in your workplace chair along with your legs and arms out, then pull them in — you pace up. Erik’s flywheel handles that actuation with two small DC motors within the spindle, which rotate a mechanism that finally pivots the arms holding the tubes of water.
Water is a perfect weight as a result of it is extremely low-cost and is straightforward to regulate. Flywheels carry out finest once they’re well-balanced and Erik simply has so as to add a little bit of water as wanted to realize that stability.
A lot of the flywheel elements have been 3D-printed and the flywheel rotates on a laser-cut plywood body. The management field can also be laser-cut plywood and it accommodates an Arduino Nano R3 improvement board, a potentiometer for adjusting pace, and buttons to regulate the motor energy and arm actuation. The drive motor is a DJI brushless DC motor for drones. A gear discount within the belt drive will increase torque.
When run in reverse, beneath energy from the flywheel, that motor produces energy — it’s like regenerative braking in an electrical automobile. In actual fact, when performing regenerative braking, the automobile itself is appearing as a kinetic battery, simply as this flywheel does!
