Boost Your Bike - Flywheel Hybrid Bike(sciencefriday.com)
sciencefriday.com
Boost Your Bike - Flywheel Hybrid Bike
http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10400
4 comments
That's very cool, I always (always = 2 weeks, since I bought my new bike) about if there was a way to reuse the energy wasted during breaking, this is a very cool solution, although it makes the bike extremely heavy :S
I kept chuckling at the 'random shot of a machine tool doing some random thing' more of an advertisement for what Cooper Union has in its shop for students to use :-).
That being said, the weight is the lose element here (and why bikes don't generally have flywheels) Also you need to be careful about braking hard and then turning :-) The depending on the energy in the wheel the gyroscopic moment on the middle of the frame which will try to twist the frame about its longitudinal axis when the wheel changes orientation in the vertical access, could be extreme.
That being said, the weight is the lose element here (and why bikes don't generally have flywheels) Also you need to be careful about braking hard and then turning :-) The depending on the energy in the wheel the gyroscopic moment on the middle of the frame which will try to twist the frame about its longitudinal axis when the wheel changes orientation in the vertical access, could be extreme.
Also, the reason these are not in cars, is that when scaled up, you're talking about a much heavier flywheel which is then spinning much faster. That can be very dangerous in a crash. Heavy steel disks spinning very quickly.
How does he steer? There must be a lot of angular momentum stored in that flywheel, making turning a non-trivial exercise in managing angular momentum.