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3 years ago
Mechanical battery.
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3 years ago
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3 years ago
gravity based batteries like the "accumulators" used to work the bascules of Tower bridge.
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3 years ago
The very term "mechanical battery" looks like a lame way of making a well-known, long-established and understood technology, with many good uses, sound like it is a new competitor.
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3 years ago
Many years ago I read an article on flywheel-powered shunting engines. I think it was in 'The Eagle' comic, circa 1955, estimated from where we were living at the time.
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3 years ago
Yup, like storing energy in a 'battery' of railway trucks on a slope (ARES).
Cheers, T i m
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3 years ago
This may have been for use in chemical plants where there could be explosive vapours. IIRC it's also been used in urban trams or buses. Not that many new ideas around apart from some of the genuine quantum stuff.
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3 years ago
No-one seems to know why flywheels store energy. Not really.
Bill
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3 years ago
And clockwork springs.
Brian
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3 years ago
Hmmm... there's a flywheel on my car engine that is not storing any energy. Ah, it's not spinning! Maybe it's something to do with moment of inertia and angular velocity. That seemed to explain it simply when I was at school.
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3 years ago
Exactly.
Years ago on a flight in an aircraft packed with electronics, I asked what the whining under the floor was: 'rotary converter: generates all the power for the racks from the aircraft batteries' 'why not an inverter?''Ever seen what happens to the battery voltage when you raise the undercarriage?'
The spinning mass of turbines and generators on the grid is the only form of short term storage it has.
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3 years ago
Or maybe not...
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3 years ago
Flywheels have been tried as an energy storage device in modern hybrid diesel locomotives. They resulted in a reduction in fuel consumption as compared to a pure diesel, but not as much as a diesel/battery hybrid.
Chemical plants often used fireless locomotives to avoid the explosion risk:
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3 years ago
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3 years ago
Bettery? Brian
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3 years ago
What about the ones where you pump water to the top of a hill? The lift on the cliffs at various places around England were operated by counterbalances witch were filled or drained of water. Brian
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3 years ago
Don't know about locomotives , but for road transport ,they came to an abrupt abondonment. All is fine until there is an accident. The flywheel dislodges and continues like a much more energetic panjanderam, demolishing everyone and everything in its very long path.
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3 years ago
These never caught on either...
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3 years ago
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3 years ago
Yes, they think it's an improvement on a battery. :-)