A 22-year old college graduate in New York has adapted hybrid car technology to a bicycle. He uses a fly-wheel to store energy generated by the brakes for use when the riding gets tough. Feeling the need for speed? If youre riding Maxwell von Steins bicycle, you can get to your destination in a flash, without having to work up a sweat. The engineering students fly-wheel bicycle employs the same energy alternating principles as a hybrid car. But rather than a battery, it uses a fly-wheel to transfer and store kinetic energy, which gives the bike a boost in speed. To build the technology, he began with a 15 pound, cast iron fly-wheel taken from a car engine. He mounted the fly-wheel in the center of the bike frame, and attached it to the rear wheel through a continuously variable transmission. [Maxwell von Stein, Inventor of the Fly-wheel Bicycle]: That transmission controls how energy is distributed between the bike and the fly-wheel. When you want to slow down you twist the transmission, its a twist shift on the right handle bar. ... By shifting that ratio, you increase the speed of the flywheel and decrease the speed of the bike. Now the flywheel is spinning really quickly, youve got energy stored there and when you need to accelerate you shift the transmission in the opposite direction for a boost in speed. Von Stein says he likes to think of the process as charging the flywheel and boosting the bike. While his self-described contraption has made biking easier, von Stein says his goal isnt to re-invent the bicycle. He is hoping to use the two-wheel experiment as a basis for developing a fly-wheel kinetic energy system for cars. He believes the system is a good alternative to battery-operated hybrid systems because it is lighter and can be packaged more easily. [Maxwell von Stein, Inventor of the Fly-wheel Bicycle]: Hybrids are really heavy. In order to get a battery with the capacity to store enough energy to move the car its got to be pretty heavy. Takes up a lot of room also. Several European car companies are already experimenting with fly-wheel technology, and von Stein estimates that cars with regenerative braking systems could hit the market by 2013.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 11:39:51 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015