Sizing the Flywheel
The energy-storage capacity of a flywheel is determined from its polar moment of inertia J and its maximum safe running speed.The necessary inertia depends on the cyclic torque variation and the allowable speed variation or, in the case of energystorage flywheels, the maximum energy requirements. The safe running speed depends on the geometry and material properties of the flywheel. Flywheels store energy. Indeed, flywheels are used as energy reservoirs. Their principal use in machine design, however, is to smooth the variations in shaft speed that are caused by loads or power sources that vary in a cyclic fashion. By using its stored kinetic energy 0.5Jω 2 to absorb the variations in torque during a machine cycle, a flywheel smooths the fluctuating speed of a machine and reduces undesirable transient loads. The effect of a flywheel is therefore fundamentally different from that of a regulator: A flywheel limits the speed variation over one cycle and has minimal effect on the average