Quote:
Originally Posted by lukevanoort
Indeed, but it isn't that hard to get 1.21 gigawatts of power either. All you need is an 80" OD cylinder with 1" walls that weighs 120lbs and spin it up to a measly ten million rpm. The cylinder is then storing about 10 gigajoules of energy... just deliver that energy in the right time and you have 1.21 gigawatts of power... By an amazing coincidence that flywheel seems to follow the weight limit and <R16> rules; I had better get working on this, don't want to get left in the future.
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Good luck to you with this project. You're going to need it.
Besides the obvious challenges of accelerating, stabilizing, and recovering energy from this 80" hula-hoop-of-death, you'll need to find a material that can withstand the hoop stress without flying apart .
Also, since the surface of your hoop will be cooking along at a just over one meter per microsecond, you'll need to refigure your energy calcs to account for special relativity. That speed is significant with respect to c.
Assuming you overcome all of the challenges, please don't present this device for inspection at a FIRST event -- good volunteers are hard enough to find without having to worry that one of our inspectors might fall into a wormhole.
__________________
Richard Wallace
Mentor since 2011 for FRC 3620 Average Joes (St. Joseph, Michigan)
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since 2003
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
(Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97)