The main worry in practice at least with the early ones is how far the thing would carry in the event that it broke free of its bearings. The Ryle 5km telescope at MRAO had a flywheel based UPS to stow the 8 scopes in the event of a storm causing a power failure since the dishes can only survive adverse weather wind loading if stowed vertically.
The power almost invariably fails at observatory sites when bad weather hits and the scopes need to be put in a safe state.
ISTR some Swiss busses use flywheel base regenerative power. An early example:
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Again it is inclined to go pear shaped very spectacularly if it ever drops out of superconducting state for any reason. It is the general problem with all high energy density storage systems even petrol.
Regenerative breaking is appearing in some electric cars.
If you convert a bike to drive a car alternator and a cheap inverter you can get people to self power a 60W light bulb. Most people are very surprised at how much effort is required for one puny incandescent lamp.
You can also have an LED load with the same light output or more lamps.
It is an ideal way to educate teenagers not to leave the lights on!
This may belabor the obvious for many of you, but:
Any time you have an efficient, compact energy storage system that's designed such that it's easy to extract the energy, you've got an accident waiting to happen. Gasoline, spinning wheels, superconducting inductors, capacitors, batteries -- it doesn't matter. There's a bunch of energy stored, and if it's in a form that's easy to extract on purpose, then it's in a form that's prone to being released by mistake. And when a lot of energy gets released where it doesn't belong, the result is generally some sort of mayhem.
Gasoline is actually pretty safe by comparison. Fires in cars are usually caused by oil, not gasoline.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Hydrogen in intercalation storage is safer. Leaked fuel goes rapidly up away from the (presumably damaged) vehicle, and gas evolution chills the medium which keeps the vapor pressure low.
No, current without voltage does not transfer any energy. Same as with vol tage wo/current. So, they must be selling volts and amps together? And in-phase, otherwise *you'd* be selling energy to *them*!
My 1970s HS physics teacher says he was called in to consult at Niagara Fal ls plant, since they had to work out legal docs on what exactly the USA was buying from the Canadian-side dynamos.
Ignore electronics and fall back to physics textbooks. In physics, EM ener gy is the same whether it's at 60Hz, or 100MHz going through coax, or cm-ra dar going through rectangular waveguides. Light, radio, and "electric powe r" are exactly the same stuff, just at different frequencies. Most beginn ers' books and many technician texts get this wrong, and they insist that 6
0Hz energy is somehow different. Fortunately The Exploratorium science mus eum corrects things: they sell an Electromagnetic Spectrum poster which has 60Hz power transmission down at the low end. They also have an exhibit ca lled Pacific Gas & Leather (instead of PG&E) which illustrates that the ele ctricity wiggles back and forth inside power lines, and none is being sold.
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Right there's your answer: Suppose you send that "AC wind" through a pipe, with a viscous absorber on the far end, and the absorber is heating up, th en what are you sending? Wave-energy. Sound. It's similar with utility c ompanies; they're sending 60Hz electromagnetic waves on twinlead transmissi on lines to the absorbers on the far end. Unfortunately we have no single word like "sound" which applies to propagating EM waves on a wire or acros s space.
On power lines, where is the energy located? What does it look like? See:
In a simple circuit, WHERE does the energy flow?
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Or simplify the above: the utility companies are selling a pumping service .
The mobile charges in the metal's "electron sea" are behaving like a drive belt. Drive belts communicate a flow of "work" whether they're made of rub ber or steel chain or electrons, and the "work" flows in a single direction , even if the belt is oscillating back and forth.
Heh, suppose there was a large steam engine in the USA, and a rotating stee l shaft extending into Canada, connected to all sorts of Canadian industria l machinery. Looking only at the steel shaft, what is being sent across th e border? Not steel. Not RPMs, since rotation wo/Torque cannot do any wor k. Not torque, since torque wo/rotation cannot do any work. Mechanical w ave energy is being sent. Sound. But in this case it's S-waves of zero fr equency. Instead the steam engine could drive an oscillating shaft, then t he energy would flow across the border as P-waves of some non-zero frequenc y.
That's part of it. But I think another part of it is that -- in the West at least -- we've had over 100 years to learn how to handle gasoline safely.
But, gas tanks don't have magic pairs of metal spots on them that will make them spontaneously combust if a metal bar is laid across, so they are better than LiPo batteries in that regard.
You are getting service from the power company. The company extracts energy from something, converts it into a form you can easily use, and delivers it to you.
I suspect you really have a different and not fully formulated question in mind.
So, you're paying for energy flow-rate, for kilowatts?
The rest of us are paying for energy, for kilowatt-hours, joules, etc.
I notice that most "electric power" companies have corrected their terminol ogy, and today they call it "electric energy" rather than power.
Not knowing the difference between power and energy ...that's almost certai nly a consequence of the low state of grade-school physics texts. After a ll, if they're constantly using terms like "electric power" to refer to ene rgy, that means power and energy are the same thing, right?
We end up with technical people who think that electric companies are selli ng "power."
You do however need specialist firefighting skills as the hydrogen flame is all but invisible in daylight and the hydrogen gas air mixture is highly explosive over a very wide range of concentrations.
I was quite impressed by the hydrogen fuel cell powered motorbike I once saw at a fuel cell and renewables exhibition. Not sure I would want to sit astride a pressure vessel full of hydrogen though. YMMV
I don't know about the US, but in Poland the *energy* we pay for is a relatively unimportant part of the bill. 1 kWh for the end customer costs about 0.55 PLN, but the energy itself amounts to ~0.15 PLN, which is 27% of the totak bill. So, we mostly pay for being taxed...
You can also hear on Discovery that there is a press with, say,
30 tons of pressure (sometimes force). First of all, it is not the unit of pressure, but even forgetting that... What is the area those 30t are applied to? Depending on that the pressure can be extremely high or mediocre...
In some places they have peak load meters. The higher the peak kW you pull in a given billing cycle, the more each kWh costs you for that period.
The rartionale was they have to upgrade the kines to make this amperage available. They did this in Ohio in aras where alot of people had electric heat, which is not cost effective in this area, but there was no gas company in the area. A captive market.
Either that or propane or oil, your call. (or coal lol, can you see calling a heating/AC company and telling them you want a new coal furnace put in your house ?)
Homopolar generators underwent a renaissance in the 1950s as a source of pulsed power storage. These devices used heavy disks as a form of flywheel to store mechanical energy that could be quickly dumped into an experimental apparatus. An early example of this sort of device was built by Sir Mark Oliphant at the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Australian National University. It stored up to 500 megajoules of energy[3] and was used as an extremely high-current source for synchrotron experimentation from 1962 until it was disassembled in
1986. Oliphant's construction was capable of supplying currents of up to
2 megaamperes (MA).
Similar devices of even larger size are designed and built by Parker Kinetic Designs (formerly OIME Research & Development) of Austin.
Lighten up. "Total amount of power" sounds like integration to me.
--
John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers
jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com
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