grat - 12 November 2009 09:47 PM

wilmywood8455 - 10 November 2009 06:29 AM

KERS is not necessarily electric; some are mechanical.

But it's still stored energy that can be fed into the drive train, and therefore used to start the car. Also, while the flywheel idea goes back to at least the 70's, I've never seen a practical application in use. The idea of having a large, heavy* gyroscope mounted in the middle of my car that's designed to go around corners disturbs me.

* To effectively store energy, the flywheel has to be heavy, or fast-- either way, that's a lot of gryoscopic force affecting the car.

I have a slightly different spin on this. If the axle is aligned horizontally then yes, it will behave like a bicycle wheel and that is a problem for making the car turn. However, if the axle is aligned vertically then it will simply keep the car flat. This might be useful for off camber corners, but not so good for banked ones. The key to stability would be keeping the center of rotation at the center of mass of the total vehilcle.

The problem is going to be torque from charging and discharging the energy into the flywheel. The effect would be similar to that which causes the left tire to get more traction than the right tire on a rear wheel drive car under acceleration (assuming standard engine rotation direction). The problem can be solved and possibly exploited by having two flywheels that rotate in opposite directions. It would be a simple matter to feed steering input to a computer and use the counter rotating wheel for energy storage when entering the corner and the co-rotating wheel for delivering power when exiting the corner. Both of these effects should put torque on the car and help it to rotate. Differential rotation between the two wheels could be equalized while going down the straights.

The total mass and rotational velocity of the flywheel can be minimized by increasing the moment. The idea is to put the majority of the weight in the outer ring and make sure it is precisely balanced.

There is nothing that can be done to eliminate the gyroscopic effect. The energy has to be stored as kinetic energy in the form of angular rotation. Increasing the moment will decrease the total weight while also making the wheel larger, but angular momentum is needed to store energy with the obvious consideration that velocity (angular speed) has more of an effect on energy than mass. As with liner motion, angular momentum is directly related to velocity (angular speed) while angular kinetic energy is related to angular speed squared.

commadore183 - 02 November 2009 04:50 PM

Well, the marshalls can push start the car, but then the car would be disqualified for receiving outside help, as far as I know.

x-bird - 07 November 2009 08:43 AM

No push starts to get the engine running. But if the driver can keep from stalling, they can be pushed out of the gravel with engine running and continue.

Or, as in one of my marshalling hightlights, Montiero tangled with Albers but, with Alber's car damaged and TM's engine running, I moved his car away from Albers and he continued with no penalty. Granted, it's not like he took points from anyone!