Quote:
Originally Posted by asid61
I felt myself shying away from that wheel...
Out of curiosity, does it explode if you run it without the wire, and if so how did you find out?
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We were having issues with delaminating wheels, which lets them expand far more and in a highly unbalanced way.
While I was trying to see if we could make it come apart it wasn't really the goal. The goal was to make sure that the wheel would not delaminate from the steel hub at a speed the shooter would never need to reach, it did not. The wheel was pulling well over 2000 times the force of gravity expanding outward in that test and nothing failed. It managed to handle around twice the stored wheel energy than what was required on the robot. The secondary effect of reducing the expansion of the wheel was just an effect of the wire resisting the outward force to a level that the rubber could handle.
Without the wire it would have delaminated or disassembled itself for sure.
Also, when you have that much energy stored in a disk the only places the pieces can go is the plane of rotation. So everyone was well clear of that plane with further room to move away. If something did fail the only damage would be to the ceiling tiles or the requirement of fresh pants.