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back to article Flexible flywheel offers cheap energy storage

Mechanical engineering isn't within the scope of Vulture South, so we'll welcome readers' input about whether this is genius or snake-oil: a Kickstarter project called the Velkess Flywheel hopes to offer low-cost energy storage. Flywheels are good at storing energy, but building them to fine mechanical specifications can get …

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  1. Choofer
    Meh

    Flywheels can be scary

    Personally i've never trusted a Flywheel UPS ever since I saw one go "bang' in a datacentre. It had been service 2 days earlier, so the suspicion is that the engineer did something wrong, but due to the large amount of damage (it basically destroyed itself) when it let go, nobody will every know. Oh it it's trail of destruction included cutting through some HV cables which required the complete shut-down of power to the facility.

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  2. Mussie (Ed)

    Fly wheel UPS

    We had 3 IIRC Flywheel UPS's in a large data center, yo dont need long for the gennys to cut in so they did the job perfectly.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My $0.02 worth

    Has anyone considered making a flywheel out of liquid metal, such as bismuth-tin-lead and encasing it in an insulated ceramic containment vessel then spinning it electromagnetically?

    The liquid phase should be stable as long as it stays hot, and no moving parts need contact the outside so a stack of these could be constructed using a single coil set for low cost.

    Ought to work in theory, you can see a miniature version of this in operation on Youtube, "spinning mercury"

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