Calculations for Energy Stored in My Flywheel
The formula that I
am using is:
Energy of the
Flywheel= 1/2*Moment of Inertia*angular velocity^2
To find the moment
of inertia, I need to use the formula
kmr^2 (inertial constant* mass of
flywheel* radius squared),
which is the moment of inertia for a rotating disk.
The inertial constant of a flat solid disk is about .606. The mass of the flywheel is about 2.5lbs, which converts to
about 1.13kg. The radius of the disk is
2.5 inches, which converts to about .064m.
Putting this back into the moment of inertia formula, we find that the moment
of inertia for my flywheel is about .0028.
To find the angular
velocity, I need to convert the RPM, or Revolutions Per Minute, into radians
per second, the basic unit for angular velocity. The rough conversion from RPM
to radians/sec is about 1 rad/s is equal to 9.55 RPM, which means that 6000 RPM,
the max RPM I was able to get my flywheel up to in the vacuum chamber, is equal
to about 628.3 rad/s.
Plugging this back
into the formula, I can find that the theoretical Energy of my Flywheel is
about 552.67 Joules of energy at top
speed. However, this number in my actual experiment is a lot lower, since there
was a lot of energy that was lost from friction on the glass, which caused some
heat, as well as the heat from the coils generated from the Eddy Currents.
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