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Reinventing the wheel - Jack Bitterly is developing the flywheel automobile engine
Discover, August, 1996 by Will Hively
with motors more powerful than gasoline engines, yet with zero emissions and no toxic wastes. Twenty-two years later--longer than expected, but still ahead of competitors--Bitterly has finished his engine prototype. He has not yet announced this fact. Almost no one outside the company has seen it. I am the first journalist to be granted permission even to play peekaboo with the plans.
At the heart of Bitterly's new engine, taking up a quarter of the space in his drawing, sits what appears to be a ludicrously simple device. When Bitterly invites me to inspect the genuine item, partly disassembled and resting on a lab bench, I can see that the drawing is accurate. The wonderful secret is a flywheel--a plain disk, semitranslucent like milky glass, with a hole in the middle for an axle. True, it's only a wheel, a gadget that in one form or another has been around since the Stone Age. But the man who made this wheel stands beside me convinced that it's capable of snuffing internal combustion.
Twelve inches in diameter, three inches thick, Bitterly's magnum opus rotates inside a tubby aluminum canister that looks thick enough to stop bullets. The complete "flywheel system," including container, weighs 90 pounds. The wheel alone--a hefty platter--weighs 50. It's made of densely packed carbon fibers similar to the high-strength graphite used nowadays in everything from golf clubs to Stealth bombers. Bitterly's wheel needs that strength. The idea is to spin it fast enough to run a car. For that purpose, "fast enough" turns out to be 100,000 revolutions per minute. Every second, in other words, this wheel turns 1,700 circles. Matter on the rim screams around at 3,700 miles per hour--roughly the speed of a bullet. But the screaming is only virtual, because the flywheel spins in a vacuum. There's no air to slow it, and no other friction to speak of. The wheel floats gracefully in empty space, collared in magnetic bearings that never quite touch its whirling axle.
U.S. Flywheel Systems is now testing a flywheel system prototype for automobiles, which the company plans to demonstrate in an actual car by year's end. It puts out a steady 25 horsepower and can kick up to 50 in short bursts. Four flywheels would have the oomph to run a standard-size car, but not for long distances. You would need 16, Bitterly says, to travel 300 miles, the distance many drivers now cover on a tank of gas. Don't worry about finding room in a car for that many flywheels. Bitterly would clear out everything from under the hood--engine, battery, and radiator--as well as transmission, gas tank, muffler, and tailpipe. Floor a 16-flywheeler and you'd get a rush of 800 horsepower. Bitterly taps out some numbers on his pocket calculator, then looks up at me and grins. "It could peel the rubber," he says, "right off the tires."
First, though, you would have to get those flywheels spinning, all 800 pounds of them. You could do it overnight using ordinary household current. Electric motors inside each canister bring the wheels up to speed. Each wheel stores 4.1 kilowatt-hours of energy; you could rev up 16 for about six dollars. The next morning you could glide quietly (or peel madly) around town, commuting or shopping all day. The flywheels would keep you going without touching any part of the automobile. Magnets on each flywheel's axle generate electricity as they whiz, past wire coils; current would flow to motors at the car's four wheels as soon as you closed a circuit by stepping on the accelerator.
As the flywheels give up their energy, they lose speed, so after driving 300 miles or so, you'd need to spin them up again, usually at home. On longer trips away from home, you could rev up your wheels in 10 to 20 minutes at recharging stations much like the ones Southern California Edison has been building for electric cars.
A flywheel-powered car is, in fact, an electric car. It would work in virtually the same manner as the battery-powered electrics now entering mass production. The main difference would be the energy source--flywheels instead of chemical batteries--and vastly improved performance' The General Motors EV1, for example, a peppy two-seater scheduled to make its debut in California and Arizona this fall, carries 26 conventional automotive lead-acid batteries. "It's the finest electric car in the world," says Bitterly, "with a terrible energy-storage system." The EV1's 1,1.00 pounds of batteries give it a practical range of just 70 to 90 miles, and those batteries will die within 100 to 200 rechargings--one or two years of typical commuting. You can replace them for about $1,800. Bitterly's flywheel system, by contrast, stores four times more energy per pound than lead-acid batteries; a simple same-weight conversion to 12 flywheels would boost the EV1's range beyond 200 miles. Those flywheels would spin up more quickly than the batteries recharge. Also, they contain no toxic materials like lead, and they run just as well when it's hot or cold. And you would never need to replace them.
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