[Red Badger]

Flying by:A computer model of Volvo's flywheel, with an outer section cut away. Credit: Volvo

[Red Badger]

Automobile Tech Ping!.............

[Cboldt]

Popular Science : August 1970

[SeeSharp]

And will the torque make it easy to turn right but hard to turn left?

[SnuffaBolshevik]

[Charles Martel]

To reduce friction, they've sealed the flywheels inside a vacuum chamber.

Seems like for production automobiles, there would be a bigger problem with soft Chinese bearings than with drag from the *air*.

[Malsua]

Flywheels are great...as long as you don't want to turn and if you can overcome the gyroscopic action, it's great.

I recall talk of this back in the 90s for Tanks. One of the issues was that when the tank is moving, It can't turn or it could potentially flip over. That's a lot of energy.

[Wuli]

I wonder if a “normally sealed unit” - as “sealed” as most ordinary “sealed” units are in cars today, filled with some very slippery but dense liquid (to reduce the flywheel’s friction) and with the flywheel suspended in it (suspended in the liquid), would be better (”almost” as efficient and more economical) than a pure vacuum.

For heat (the sealed-in-fluid may obtain heat in the operation of the flywheel), engineer the casing of the unit to “exchange” the heat out of the unit in some way, either simply, because it - the casing is exposed to air somehow, or some more esoteric solution.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Those things will act like C4 in an accident.

[antiRepublicrat]

utomakers face the problem of how to maintain the vacuum, since the seals that connect the flywheel to a transmission aren't perfect.

Simple, make the flywheel essentially the inner part of an electric generator. Add or bleed energy using electromagnets, not a mechanical transmission.

[Voter62vb]

Some good back-of-the-cereal-box-reading here: http://flywheel.esmartbiz.com/facts.htm

[pabianice]

And how will the extra energy needed to spin the flywheel and carry its weight be offset by transferring its reduced spin to power the wheels? Sounds like perpetual motion to me.

[Abathar]

If you lose the vacuum just hand this back-up to your wife or girlfriend and say you need her to reduce some friction...

[Atlas Sneezed]

The torque issues are real, no matter how the flywheel is oriented.

But equal counter-rotating wheels will address the issue fully, given a sturdy frame to connect them.