Ricardo, in collaboration with various
industrial and academic partners, has delivered a flywheel safety test
environment to develop next-generation flywheel energy storage systems.
As a result, the
FlySafe project has been established to investigate potential failure
mechanisms and behaviours of high-speed flywheel systems.
Operating a
high rotational speeds, these systems offer a practical and potentially
cost-effective mechanical means of saving fuel and reducing carbon emissions
through the mechanical storage and reuse of energy in applications such as
regenerative braking.
The FlySafe
research aims to provide best-practice design guidelines for the safety
containment systems of high speed flywheels, appropriate for commercial mass
market deployment of these systems. A key output of the project in this respect
will be a proposed BSI flywheel safety standard.
The research
will use a new test environment at the University of Brighton, UK, to gain an
understanding of the rate of energy release, enabling industry to design safety
containment systems that are compact, light-weight and low cost, while
effective in providing flywheel safety.
The test environment,
now been completed, has been developed by the FlySafe project and installed at
the Centre for Automotive Engineering, Brighton. It is believed to be the first
and most advanced of its type in the world.
The unit is
capable of testing flywheels spinning at up to 60,000 rev/min in a vacuum. In
addition to providing for non-destructive testing, it incorporates imaging and
sensor technology to investigate the behaviour of flywheels when one or more
engineering defects might cause to the flywheel to fail at high-speed through
the incorporation of a range of engineered defects.
Video is
acquired with a high-speed system recording at 20,000 images per second with
the flywheel illuminated by a high-intensity pulsed laser synchronised to the
camera. At this high frame rate the camera can record approximately just two
seconds of video, so accurate synchronisation of the recording with the failure
event is critical.
The University
of Brighton has developed a custom data acquisition system monitoring a number
of sensors to enable this. These include accelerometers, strain, pressure,
distance and temperature measurements within the flywheel enclosure and
allowing to trigger the camera on the occurrence of specific conditions which
might be expected to lead to failure.
Such failure
conditions might include, for example, a sudden expansion of the flywheel due
to the onset of delamination or fragmentation, loss of vacuum pressure, or loss
of speed.
A key objective
of the FlySafe research is to gain an understanding of the rate of energy
release, enabling industry to design safety containment systems that are compact,
light-weight and low cost, while effective in providing flywheel safety.
The FlySafe
project, supported by Innovate UK, is a collaboration between Ricardo, the
University of Brighton, Imperial College London and three leading UK based
high-speed flywheel energy storage technology developers – Torotrak Group and
GKN Hybrid Power and Ricardo.
The project
builds upon high-speed imaging techniques that were originally developed as
part of the University of Brighton’s extensive research in visualising fuel
sprays and combustion events in engines.
As such, the
project is opening a new area of interdisciplinary research, combining the
University’s existing optical techniques expertise with those of materials
engineering researchers at Imperial College London. This new collaboration will
provide fundamental understanding of the failure processes in composite
flywheels.
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