Flywheels achieving linear motion

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by mechanicalbrain

I need a little help with an idea of mine. I want to take a flywheel (10 pound disk with 10" diameter) and apply all of its stored energy into a single linear movement of a rod. ..... I really want to put quite a bit of force into a single thrust, and I really need to be able to spin this up to full potential fairly quickly.

Two issues here:

First, spinning it up quickly: The stronger the motor, the faster it spins up. Remember there's a maximum speed for your disk, maybe 10 or 20,000 RPM. Build a safety cage just in case it does blow up...

Second, extracting the energy: Some kind of a clutch. You need to move your rod ('punch') only 1/4"

A magnetic clutch (like used for a car's air conditioning compressor) will allow far too much slippage, even though it can transmit 7 or 8 Horsepower, not as a shock load.

Trying to mesh gears will only break the gears. Again, shock load it far too high.

How about how big punch presses do it? They take the flywheel energy and gear it down a zillion times, and the 'punch' rod moves only 1/4" every five to 10 seconds. When you're ready to extract the energy, just put a 1/8" piece of metal between the punch and die and WHAM (or more like Crrrunch). Need very strong gears though - wide teeth at the slow speeds, can be expen$ive. Belts and pulleys at the fast speeds should be OK, since you are trading torque for speed.

Oh, to make the demo really cool, you can set the "full" speed of the flywheel to some point where the energy extracted is nearly 100%, so the disk almost comes to a complete halt while punching the hole... Very dramatic.

Good luck

Don