Genius Hour Blog: Introduction

     This project is a continuation of my science fair project. For my project, I will be taking a Flywheel Energy Storage Device (FES) and I will be changing a few variables on it, including making it levitate using magnets, putting it in a vacuum chamber, varying the type of metal inside the motor-generators, and I will get it to work in a zero-gravity environment.

     As of now, FES devices are primarily used in partnership with different renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar energy, in order to store excess energy in an environmentally friendly way. The way it works is whenever there is excess energy, the energy will go to the FES and will get the flywheel spinning at a very fact velocity. Then, whenever there is no more energy going into the flywheel, the FES will regenerate the stored energy by transferring the energy back through the motor-generator. This is useful because the FES is a very clean way to store energy, and also has an infinite life span, as opposed to the battery, the other common way to store energy, which harms the environment and can only be used for a limited time since they produce electrical energy using chemical reactions, while the FES stores produces electrical energy using kinetic motion.

     The first thing I will be testing with my FES is that I am going to make it levitate using magnetic fields. This is arguably the most important and the most difficult portion of my project. The reason that this is the most important is because the main goal of an FES is to make it as efficient as possible, which means the most efficient flywheel will have the least amount of losses in its system. Losses in the system come from a wide variety of sources, both electrical and mechanical, and the levitation is an attempt to cut back on the mechanical losses. The main mechanical losses on the system are friction and air resistance. By having the flywheel almost fully levitating, the amount of energy lost to friction is very small, which would allow the flywheel to spin for a much longer time than if the flywheel was rubbing against a bearing. However, this part of the project was and will continue to be the hardest part, because getting a flywheel to levitate requires very precise positioning of the magnets, as well as making sure every weight on the shaft is balanced along the center axis so the flywheel will float and turn smoothly.

     The other mechanical loss in the system, air resistance, is also a huge issue, but with a somewhat simple solution. To combat air resistance, which is the largest loss on the system once the flywheel is levitating, I will test the FES in a vacuum chamber, which has no air and, thus, no air resistance. While I have the vacuum chamber, I will also be testing how much more efficient the vacuum environment has on the system as a whole.

     The final variable that will attempt to minimize the amount of losses in the system is the modification of the motor-generator core. In motor-generators, a very common and difficult problem is the abundance of Eddy Currents in a system. I still need to get more research on Eddy Currents in a future blog, but a short synopsis of the concept is that Eddy Currents act as resistances to magnetic fields and will cause magnet wire to lose electrons, thus reducing the amount of electrical energy coming back from the system. There is another problem that occurs with my specific design, with the levitation, which is backing magnetic fields, or backing MF. Backing MFs are simply magnetic fields that try to resist a change, which is common with motor-generators that utilize magnetic fields to get a motor turning. However, both of these problems can be modified by changing the type of material inside the magnet wire in the motor-generator, known as the core. I will be testing four different cores, all with different properties that will attempt to remove the electrical losses in the system (more specifics to come).

     The last thing I will be doing with my flywheel is possibly the most difficult part of my project, and is also the continuation part of the project: getting the flywheel to work in zero-gravity. The most practical utilization of a zero-gravity FES is on the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. Right now, NASA uses solar panels to power the ISS, which is already commonly used with FES devices. The other practicality is that the ISS is in space, which is a natural vacuum, which would cut down on the amount of electrical power needed to keep the vacuum chamber at a level of zero air resistance. This would help the ISS because the ISS uses rechargeable nickel-hydrogen batteries to store solar energy, which though not as environmentally harmful as traditional batteries, still have a limited lifespan and still use chemicals to reproduce energy. By using a flywheel, the space station would be fully sustainable without need of a replacement over time, as both FES devices and solar panels have an infinite lifespan.