Problem with a rotating mass in a moving vehicle is angular momentum and how it may affect the handling of said vehicle. Like changing the direction of a heavy gyroscope.
And heaven forbid that it is in an accident where any of the support structures are compromised. Can you imagine the spinning mass mashing through whatever is in it's way until it has lost it's energy.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be researched and maybe implemented. Certainly it couldn't be worse than our current bombs called "gas tanks" now.
In case you get as excited about uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes) and other data center power backup schemes as I do, I highly encourage you to study up on a new technology introduced this week by one of the flywheel technology companies, VYCON.
The company is pitching its new product, the Hybrid VDC XEB Energy Storage System, as an environmentally friendly way to protect a data center from a sudden loss of its power supply. The VDC XEB work in two steps: If there is a power disturbance, the flywheel mitigates and absorbs them by generating power from kinetic energy. VYCON’s new product has a back-up line of defense for that approach, so to speak, in the form of an integrated battery. If an outage is extended, the battery can pick up in prolonged power outages.
The graphic below is VYCON’s anatomy of a flywheel system.
Said Dann McKeraghan, sales and marketing vice president for VYCON:
“For customers, the flywheel will continue to be the first line of support with the battery providing the added runtime when called upon. They Hybrid VDC XEDB reduces the number of outages and cycles the battery has to support by 98 perent, thereby offering extended battery life.”
If you read the customer testimonials on VYCON’s Web site, you will notice that flywheel technology is often used as an adjunct with UPS setups as a way to protect against unreliable battery. The Hybrid VDC XEB technology is compatible with most three-phase UPS systems. It connects to the direct current (DC) bus of those systems.
Jon Crowhurst, director of technical services for EasyStreet, a VYCON data center customer, is quoted:
“We have two battery-based UPSs that we’ve had for almost twelve years. While the UPSs themselves have been reliable, we’ve experienced three failures of the batteries. We do preventive maintenance every quarter as the factory recommends and still we weren’t able to avoid battery failures. VYCON’s VDC-XE units were the perfect fit as they easily pair with highly efficient, double-conversion UPS systems and take up significantly less real estate than banks of batteries.”
(To clarify, Crowhurst’s comments are about a previous generation of technology, but you get the point.)
As I was poking through VYCON’s information, I noticed that the 11-year-old company has scored distribution partnerships with two big players in the UPS and power distribution equipment world, Emerson (which makes the Liebert brand) and Eaton. That in itself should make the VYCON technology worth an evaluation.
