New propulsion sytems for ships

Bitterly's pioneering

RE-INVENTING THE WHEEL
(Source: Will Hively, DISCOVER MAGAZINE, 8/96)

Nobody questions Jack Bitterly's brilliance, but is this 77-year-old inventor on the verge of making the automobile's internal combustion engine obsolete? It all hinges on whether flywheel technology is up to the task.

Not familiar with flywheel technology? Here's a short primer:

-- Flywheels have been around since the Stone Age. Early steam engines utilized giant flywheels as big as 17 feet in diameter to damp out the shudder of the huge pistons. Bitterly's flywheel is 12 inches in diameter, three inches thick, weighs 50 pounds and spins at the incredible rate of 100,000 rpm (that's 1,700 times a second)! The flywheel is made of densely-packed carbon fibers similar to those used in golf clubs and Stealth bombers. It has to be made strong because the outside rim spins at 3,700 miles per hour. It makes no noise because it floats on magnetic bearings and is housed in an aluminum cannister from which all the air has been removed.

-- One flywheel assembly weighs 90 pounds and can generate 25 horse power. 12 to16 units would be needed to power a standard-size car 300 miles, about the same distance as a tank of gas would take it. It is estimated that the unit manufacturing cost would be around $800, making the total cost of the drive train about $10,000 to $13,000. This high cost compared to conventional engines or automotive lead-cell batteries would be offset by the fact that the power source would last the life of the car and the cost of energy equivalent to a tank of gas would be about $6.

-- The way flywheels work is that once they are up to speed (hooked up to a conventional power source, it takes about 10 to 20 minutes for a small electric motors to accomplish this act), their kinetic energy is converted into electrical energy by small generators which in turn powers electric motors on each wheel of the car.

-- A flywheel-powered car is, in fact, an electric car. The main difference is the energy source -- flywheels instead of batteries -- and vastly improved performance. The range of typical electric cars is 70 to 90 miles and their batteries have to be replaced every year or two at a cost of $1,800. Bitterly's flywheel car has a range of 300 miles, the system recharges in 20 minutes, contains no toxic materials, and is virtually maintenance free.

In a peculiar twist, research and development costs of Bitterly's company, U.S. FLYWHEEL SYSTEMS are being underwritten by Kevin Costner. The actor and director of the movie "Waterworld", was so moved by the image of a world destroyed by mankind's dependence on fossil fuels, that he created COSTNER INDUSTRIES, with the express purpose of investing in new technologies that promise to improve the environment. Dan Costner, Kevin's brother and manager of the investment company, states that U.S. FLYWHEEL SYSTEMS is "certainly the crown jewel of COSTNER INDUSTRIES."

A working prototype of the system was unveiled at a closed symposium on flywheels at OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE NATIONAL LABORATORY in August, 1995. Bitterly feels that they will start testing a flywheel-powered car by the end of the year.

So far no big auto manufacturer has picked up the option to incorporate Bitterly's design into their models. Meanwhile, there is considerable interest in Bitterly's flywheels powering satellites in space and trains in Germany. He also has a static model in the works that could be used as a back-up power generator. In the event of a power failure, it could assume the load within nanoseconds, thus preventing valuable computer data from being lost.

How long do Bitterly's flywheel systems last? He has designed the system to survive at least 10,000 run-and-recharge cycles. Under normal conditions, that would mean a life of 27 years -- and that's only a lower limit. flywheel systems last? He has designed the system to survive at least 10,000 run-and-recharge cycles. Under normal conditions, that would mean a life of 27 years -- and that's only a lower limit.

 

Library of Links on Flywheels

Here are some interesting links on the subject

http://www.awesomelibrary.org/Classroom/Technology/Machines/Flywheels.html

 

Rosen brothers work

These fellows spent a considerable amount of their own money chasing this dream, and primarily quit as they foresaw the great difficulty with bucking up against the auto manufacturing gaints in the USA. This is why I sought to take some of this technology over to SE Asia where the 'young infrastructure' might have allowed it to grow much greater.

Exotic Auto Venture Is $24-Million Nonstarter
The Business: Rosen Motors

Founded: 1993

Closed: 1997

Cause of Death: Major car manufacturers' rejection of new, flywheel-based engine technology

In August 1996, brothers Benjamin and Harold Rosen summoned a throng of journalists and auto executives to the remote Mojave Desert, in California. The founders of Rosen Motors had spent three years developing a hybrid electric vehicle. Now they were ready to debut their version of the car of the future. As the road test began, the spectators craned their necks in anticipation.

The car refused to budge.

The moment was humbling for the Rosens, who had resolved to do nothing less than end the internal combustion engine's century-long reign under the hood. Yet the problems that would make Rosen Motors a nonstarter ultimately weren't technical but commercial.

If reinventing the automobile is an undeniable long shot, the Rosens nonetheless seemed a better bet than most to pull it off. Harold, 72, is a former Hughes Electronics engineer who pioneered the geostationary communications satellite. Ben, 65, is the chairman of Compaq Computer Corp. and a legend in the personal-computer industry. His venture-capital firm's early investments in Compaq and Lotus Development Corp. hiked the worth of his stock holdings to more than $100 million.

The brothers fueled their new venture with nearly $24 million of that money, soliciting no outside investment. ("I didn't want to take money without confidence there would be a customer," says Ben.) Their aim: to create a means of propulsion that would be cleaner and more fuel-efficient than the internal combustion engine yet more practicable than the batteries in electricity-powered cars, which require recharging after relatively short driving distances.

Their exotic design combined a small, gasoline-fed turbine with an energy-storing flywheel. The turbine provided electricity for propulsion. The flywheel, spinning as fast as 55,000 rotations per minute in the car's trunk, could store energy that's normally dissipated during braking and release it for sudden bursts of acceleration--acceleration that a turbine alone couldn't provide.

By all accounts, the company, based in Woodland Hills, Calif., solved some terrifically thorny engineering problems. And several months after its embarrassing failure, the test car redeemed itself with a successful performance.

The Rosens' business model, by contrast, never got on track. Rather than build an entire car, they had planned to produce its vital innards, the drivetrain, much the way Intel Corp. creates chips for computer makers. But tradition-bound Detroit is not disposed to contract out the guts of its cars to another manufacturer, and the Rosens say they never considered licensing out the technology. "The drivetrain is just so critical for the big manufacturers," says John Paul MacDuffie, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "It was a gamble to try to break into the industry that way."

The stumbling block, ironically, wasn't resistance to innovation but too much enthusiasm for it. The major automakers snubbed Rosen Motors' visionary drivetrain because they were already hard at work on their own environmentally friendly alternatives, and flywheel technology didn't figure into their plans. Glenn Mercer, director of automotive services at McKinsey & Co., explains, "The Rosens just got squeezed out."

With their company entering a costly crash-testing phase, and with automakers in Detroit and overseas unwilling to bankroll it, the Rosens decided to call it quits, putting their 70 employees out of work. Reinventing the automobile turns out to be as difficult as it sounds--even for Ben Rosen. --Jerry Useem

 

Very nice posts, Brian.
So, I ask again, Why shouldn't we consider the posssibility of a flywheel powered boat for, let's say, weekend cruising, charging the flywheel at marina mains during the week?
Quoting you:
"One flywheel assembly weighs 90 pounds and can generate 25 horse power. 12 to16 units would be needed to power a standard-size car 300 miles, about the same distance as a tank of gas would take it. It is estimated that the unit manufacturing cost would be around $800, making the total cost of the drive train about $10,000 to $13,000. This high cost compared to conventional engines or automotive lead-cell batteries would be offset by the fact that the power source would last the life of the car and the cost of energy equivalent to a tank of gas would be about $6."

This doesn't seem so expensive for a boat's driving installation....

Being safety one of the major concerns, here is also an interesting page:
http://www.testdevices.com/flywheel_article.htm

 

I doubt the auto mfg resistance was to the new technology, ONLY to the possible results of a crash.

AS thousands of cars crash daily the concept of an unbraked runaway flywheel , (at 100,000 to 200,000rpm) with the energy content of 3 or 5 gallons of gas heading for the shopping mall or skool house probably scared the pants off them.

As one plotical party gets HUGE (beating out even the Skool "teachers" union)
contributions from Trial Lawiers , the liability issue is too great.

Much progeress is now completly stopped , by the TERROR the Liars For Hire create in EVERY productive enetrprise.

Since the far east has no "Life is a Lotterey" (if you can become a victum mentality, yet) most of our future tech progress will be from there.

Most Democracys died (before Fractional Reserve Banking)
when "the populace voted themselves into the treasury"

today it seems a corrupt partisan media , their junk science , and greedy Liars for Hire will speed the death of Western Civilazation.

We will not be "running out" of oil for 300+ years , but will there be anyone left to turn ON the lights?

FAST FRED

 

Low-Tech Applications, NOW!

Interesting posting Guillermo. I can see we both have a real interest in this subject.

I'm not so sure this alone hampered further development. Fuel cost in this country have been so low compared with the rest of the world there just has not been real economic reasoning for development of alternative methods, devices, technology. Maybe that will finally change with this new realization of world fuel prices. Hopefully we will see a whole host of new technologies get new research.

One of the problems I saw with the flywheel work was an 'over emphasis' on getting the whole technology optimized to its ultimate state prior to putting a product on the market. Yes, it is optimum that the chamber housing the flywheel maintain a near perfect vacuum so as to optimize the aero-frictional losses of the spinning wheel. But what's to prevent the allowance for a less than perfect vacuum and accepting some losses while we move towards a more optimum system. What's to prevent maintaining a safety limit on allowable revolutions now, until better wheels are developed? What's to prevent the use of these in underground (safe) installations at 'base line' power stations as 'peaking device' stowage, now??

Just as with the very early Swiss bus system usage, there are lower-tech practical uses for these devices right now. Lets get started now, then build upon the technology as we learn more. I think these higher fuel prices will promote such thoughts if we don't let ourselves slip back into the old modes of "fuel prices will come back down eventually"

Why not a lower-tech approach with a commuter car for now? Don't worry about an onboard charging source. Utilize a slightly lower tech, safety-limited spinning wheel, rechargable at night at your home, that would get you to work and back. And package it up in smart little 'cute' car like the BMW mini rather than some ugly aero-look. I'll bet you couldn't keep them on the sales lot right now. And you wouldn't be worrying about replacing those very expensive, heavy batteries in the current hybrids.

Thats not how these super flywheels come apart. In the majority of situations the pure fiber wheels just sort of 'fuzz up' as they come apart. Don't try to mix in metal components at this early stage, or maybe never.

 

I have several concerns about flywheels, for boats or autos: The safety issue isn't one of absolute safety, but rather relative safety. As with everything else, this relates to cost. A flywheel with a "bulletproof" safety housing is going to be more expensive than one without. How much more? Double? 10X? Similarly, a flywheel with computer monitoring for pre-failure cracks is going to include the cost of this monitoring equipment. How much will this cost?

Second, what is the cost of failure? If my battery leaks, I have to deal with acid in the bilge. If my flywheel fails, perhaps I have a big hole in the bottom of my boat? So, more cost in safety equipment, because the ramifications of failure are more grave. I hear someone complaining about disposal of batteries, versus "clean" flywheel power. How much petroleum-based resin is involved in the flywheel's manufacture? How much energy in the manufacture of the filiment? How much in the computer controls? How about pollution from eventual disposal of all the subsidiary parts of the flywheel? I already know precisely how much my lead acid battery pollutes, both to manufacture and to recycle. Before I (the royal "I"--I mean the public) will change, I want to know the whole story.

Third, in a boat, I am less concerned about energy storage versus weight, and more concerned about energy storage versus cost, and to a lesser extent, versus volume. Where do flywheels stand in these respects, compared to batteries?

Fourth, has anyone considered gyroscopic effects of flywheels, in boats? A flywheel will strongly resist motion about one axis, and boats rotate about all three in a seaway. Will this steal energy from the flywheel? Make the boat unmanageable? Sure, it could be helpful, if in a sailboat it is aligned to resist heeling, but from where will the resisting energy come from?

Sorry to sound like a doubter, but before a technology is acceptable, it should be clearly superior, not just "cool."

Dave.

 

Brian, are you considereing failure due to overspeed, or failure due to a destructive crash? If a flywheel absorbes all the considerable kinetic energy of a crashing automobiile (worst case), are you *sure* it's not going to come apart? Sure, I understand that gasoline can explode, too, but after a century of refinement, we have learned to minimize the actual occurrance of fire and explosion in car crashes(Pintos excluded!) Can we have this level of assurance about flywheels?

This would be less of an issue aboard boats, of course.

Last, are we sanguine about our governments burning coal to produce the electricity to power up our super flywheels? Is this better/worse than burning diesel?

Dave

 

What's to prevent the use of these in underground (safe) installations at 'base line' power stations as 'peaking device' stowage, now??

The inability to scale them UP.
While a wheel holding 5gallons of gasoline energy has been created , to spin a big one to hold 50,000gal of energy would require different materials.

In the Hudson river the Nuke plants pump water up a mountain to a resivoir (at low load times) , and draw down the water for the high peal loads.


Last, are we sanguine about our governments burning coal to produce the electricity to power up our super flywheels? Is this better/worse than burning diesel?

The US has an increadable quantity of coal , which with todays tech can be converted into Diesel fuel at about $35.00 a bbl.

If the universities will get off the decades of Subsidized Feed Wagon , most of our electric will come from small clean Fusion plants.

The ability do do it NOW with clean & safe Fission , but the Green nuts have legally blocked every new power plant , as long as they have blocked refinerys, 30YEARS!

The use of a flywheel on a boat would be limited to what batterys do now, just with the ability to do rapid charges or discharges , with out the harm that wet batts suffer.

FAST FRED

 

The US is a little behind the times on coal, which Ontario is phasing out. It is now well known that even FBC, CG and other 'clean coal' technologies still emit a lot of rather nasty materials into the air.
I would like to see any evidence to back up the diesel-from-coal claim. Everything I have seen on this topic indicates that you'd be burning almost as much extra coal as you'd be getting liquid fuel just to overcome the inefficiencies of the process.

Believe me, we're trying as hard as we can. To the average citizen this sounds like a wonderful solution. To an engineer it's a nightmare that involves precisely controlling a spinning ring of plasma at temperatures that would instantly vapourize diamond, using only magnets. We're still several years and several cash infusions away from success.

Not sure about the States, but in Canada our main issue with fission is cost. Ontario has had good and bad experiences with fission- for a while we had a nearly unlimited supply of cheap electricity, but now our generators have a huge debt from the construction of these incredibly complex machines. ACL has proven that fission can be safe (one of our plants was recently designated a provincial park and wildlife reserve), they just haven't proven it can be cheap. Given the US's tendency to put nuclear plants near population centres, I can understand why the 'Green nuts' referred to here might be less than enthusiastic about new ones. Especially since in the US, they'd probably be PWRs, an architecture that is not inherently stable as the ACR and CANDU architectures are.

 

Storing Energy

I read over the article posted by Guillermo and found some interesting discussion;
"As flywheel failure modes are both design- and material dependent, accepted design rules have not yet been established for composite units, according to CEM researchers. A flywheel's energy-storage potential is proportional to its mass moment of inertia and the square of the rotational speed. For a specific rotor configuration, speed is limited by the material's strength-to-density ratio. For this reason, flywheel engineers selected high-strength, lightweight composite materials. CEM engineers observed that composite flywheels are operated at stresses near the material's ultimate strength to maximize energy storage.

"The range of current flywheel designs are in some sense bounded by mass-loaded types on one end and preloaded on the other," said Richard C. Thompson, CEM research associate. There are various kinds of intermediate types. Different rotor designs have a propensity for different types of failures. The nuances of operation and fabrication also has an effect. Despite the design differences, "at comparable tip speeds, their stress and strain states look generally the same," he said.

Mass-loaded flywheels have a radially increasing specific stiffness or modulus to generate radial compression with increasing speed, which creates a large force gradient across the weak direction of the composite. "You need the radial compression to hold it together," Thompson said. Generally, this design can be more susceptible to burst (a failure of the fiber/matrix material in the hoop direction), especially if the loss of the outer ring results in hoop failure of all the inner rings. Bursts can be catastrophic because they are accompanied by a significant energy release. Burst failure is considered the most extreme challenge to a containment system. Mass-loaded units are said to be easier to fabricate than preloaded wheels.

Preloaded designs, by contrast, are fabricated to exhibit constant or near-constant specific modulus (stiffness). They are characterized by a tendency to delaminate before experiencing a burst, especially when they incorporate lower-modulus graphite composites. De-lamination is a physical separation of a localized portion of the flywheel due to loss of radial compression, leading to a de-bond between hoop fiber layers. De-bonds can also be initiated by creep of the matrix or matrix degradation due to elevated temperature. It typically produces an imbalance caused by the shifting mass that can quickly overcome bearing load capacity, requiring flywheel shutdown. Polar-woven flywheel designs are resistant to de-laminations due to the inclusion of radially oriented fibers.

In preloaded designs, the flywheel typically contacts the shaft with no coupling component or hub, Thompson said; the flywheel is assembled from two or more wound fiber rings press- or shrink-fit together. "At assembly you put in enough radial pre-compression such that radial compression is maintained throughout the speed range."

And "Once the test data are in, engineers hope to come up with some innovative concepts that will lead to a feasible and reliable containment system, DARPA's Gully said. According to CEM research engineer Mark Pichot, there are several classes of containment schemes. "First is the brute-force approach using heavy-walled pressure vessels." The rigid structure will handle the high forces, but difficulties in limiting torque loads on the mounting systems and the high weight make them less than optimal for vehicles, he said.

Another concept is a rotatable ring that spins to soak up energy when impacting flywheel fragments transmit their high torque. "By spreading the torque over time, this approach limits the forces that must be contained," Hayes said. The other general containment design would rely on an energy-absorbing liner; "this is the soft-catch approach-something like a catcher's mitt," Pichot said.

According to Pichot, some sort of hybrid or combination approach may finally end up being used in commercial applications."



It does seem to show there is work being carried out. Hopefully the current fuel situation will spur on more intense research. I would love to see just a small part of the brain power and money we put into weapons development be put into this type of research. Problem I see is its being manged by DARPA, a defense industry entity (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va.). They certainly are bias to Mr Rumsfeld and the military industrial complex....not commercial ventures

Energy stowage densities on the order of 10 to 20 times that of the very best batteries last time I checked....and that was some time ago.

Multiple pairs of smaller units could cancel out gyro effects

The reservoir stowage method is a very good simply technology. Its just not very applicable in a lot of locations.

The 'big' wheel idea is now passe' with the realization that the energy stowage capability is linked to the square of the speed, verses linearly to the mass of the wheel. So multiple smaller units appears to be the way to go.

Baseline power stations are a little different than many of the power stations you see locally. They truly are at their most efficent operation if they do not have to cycle up and down with the public's night and day demand. But what do you do with that excess energy at night?? Pump water up a hill so it can run down the next day is one solution. Charge up spinning wheels is another.
At this immediate time it's a question of burning the fuel (coal or diesel or gas) in the most efficent manner. Baseline stations are the most efficent of our current powerplants.

The real hope is the harnessing of nuclear power. But I would suggest that nuclear power could be that huge nuclear reaction in our SUN. It bombards us with a tremendous amount of energy every day. We just have to find better ways to collect it and STOW it until our needs arise.

Or if the nuclear energy comes from more traditional plants they also like to operate like a baseline plant, so we need Stowage.

I also think we haven't paid enough attention to that tremendous heat source in our earth's core. Look how deep we are drilling for oil. Imagine tapping into the edge of that molten core.

Power from the Sun and the Earth's core would be pretty pollution free as well. We just need to be able to store some of this energy we could collect.

 

Megawatts from waves through ferrofluids?

I've found this interesting information about the use of ferrofluids to generate energy from the ocean's waves. They are already working for buoys applications, but inventor is trying to go big scale.
http://fusor.net/board/view.php?site=fusor&bn=fusor_future&key=1143129673

From there:
"Oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, tested the design in the summer of 2004. "Just a few watts of power is all that's required to run most marine instruments and to transmit their data to a satellite," says Robert Pinkel, head of the buoy development team at Scripps. The team designed a float that amplifies its movement to deliver maximum acceleration to Cheung's device, and electronics to store the electricity it generates in a super-capacitor. The generator proved itself even in calm conditions: in a gentle sea with waves of around 60 centimetres it generated 0.3 watts. With further work to optimise the transfer of wave power to the generator, the team hopes it will be able to deliver on average 1 watt of electricity.

Cheung's latest design uses coils mounted at right angles to the direction of the magnet (see below). The challenge now is to increase the power output by tweaking the design of both the buoy and the generator. Cheung is planning to work with Malcolm Spaulding and Stephan Grilli from the University of Rhode Island in Kingston to model the most efficient designs and test them in a wave tank.

The aim is to generate not merely watts, but megawatts. "Our goal is to build an energy farm on the ocean," Cheung says. Stephen Salter, who heads the wave power group at the University of Edinburgh, UK, thinks that may be a step too far. Though the iron particles in the ferrofluid maximise the current induced in the coil - by increasing the flux density around it - Salter is sceptical about the technology's viability for large-scale generation. "I think this is one technology that's going to run out of puff as you scale it up." Nevertheless, Cheung says he could have a prototype of a wave power system ready within three years.
“Our goal is to build an energy farm on the ocean”

Even if Cheung doesn't manage to scale it up efficiently, he has dreamed up plenty of other applications for his invention. So many, in fact, that he has set up a company to commercialise them. They include self-powered tyre pressure monitors, computer mice and TV remote controls.

He has an idea for an executive toy, too. Put an even number of magnets coated in ferrofluid into a doughnut-shaped tubular ring - with their north and south poles facing each other - and they will shuttle around chaotically as they repel one-another. The result is somewhere between a stress ball and a pocket-sized lava lamp.

Cheung's first commercial product is going to be much more useful. In the coming months his company will launch a holster-style mobile phone charger. "The first goal is to have enough power to keep the phone on standby forever," he says. All you'll have to do is shake it."

Here info from the patent:
http://www.freshpatents.com/Magneti...id-end-bearings-dt20041216ptan20040251750.php

Maybe also useful to keep flywheels spinning, for boating applications...?

 

"Problem I see is its being manged by DARPA, a defense industry entity (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va.). They certainly are bias to Mr Rumsfeld and the military industrial complex....not commercial ventures "

Darpa is the only usefull agency in the US government as far as science goes.
NASA is long dead in terems of research or advances , and is now just thousands of career burorats looking for career stability , and terrified of the real world.

The best thing NASA could do would be to cease operation , fire everyone , and start with a new name and staff.

DARPA is a whole different concept.

Instead of deciding what "progress" is desired and issuing multi million dollar thousands of page contracts,
DARPS sets a use goal , and allows the world to bid on its achievement.
TIME to completion is part of the DARPA requirement , not an open Forever wallet.

Most of the best worldwide research is done by DARPA , weather it has civilan use depends on the intelligence of the civilans in using new tech.

FAST FRED

 

Why not give us a few examples of their contributions?

It seems funny that you would accuse NASA of being a member of the 'open check book' club. It seems that the Pentegon is pretty good at that too. Have they ever had anything come anywhere near within (originally quoted) buget?

And aren't they the 'cost plus' guys? $500 hammers? $2000 toilet seats?

As far as NASA goes, If I were president, the first thing I would do is go down there and tell the big cheese down there that there will be no #$*& ups on my watch. Or I will go down there and personally and publicy fire him.

Imagine if that happened after Challenger? Columbia might never have happened.

The way I see it, the trouble starts in most big bureauocracies when the people running them start to see themselves as immune to any real accountability.

Bob

 

Sharpii2--

Start with the Arpanet -- now known as the Internet. That's one I think you're familiar with.

No. And why is it that when a lie is repeated often enough, people believe it? The examples you're offering have been disproven so many times, you have to be avoiding the truth so as to not stumble into it.

You mean if they would have fired all of the people who didn't understand O-rings, they would have learned all the secrets of heat tiles? How exactly does that work?