ENGINEERING DYNAMICS (Determination of the second Moment of Mass of a Flywheel)

ORIGIN:

MILES OPARA ID no. 000531322 Dept. Of Mechanical Engineering BEng.

DATE:

Published on the 20th April, 2011.

ENGINEERING DYNAMICS (Determination of the second Moment of Mass of a Flywheel)

INTRODUCTION: Engineering Systems especially in vehicles and power plants have found the flywheel, a mechanical device of spinning wheel or disc with significant moment of inertia whose rotation is only about one axis, the subject of extensive research in power storage. The energy a flywheel stores is proportional to the square of the rotational speed. Therefore, if a flywheels speed doubles, the amount of energy it stores will quadruple. This energy, stored in the rotor as kinetic energy or more specifically a rotational energy resist changes in their rotational speed and by so doing help steady or smoothen the rotation of the shaft when a fluctuating torque or rapid explosions from the engine that provide the power is exerted on it by its power source such as that caused by a piston-based reciprocating engine or an intermittent load like the motion of a piston pump that is placed on it. Unlike a battery, the flywheel will never lose its ability to charge and discharge energy and therefore used in variety of mechanism with the amount of energy stored in it dependant on its second moment of inertia (or moment of inertia) and its rotational speed. Newtons Second law of motion states that force is equal to mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration. However, this equation holds differently for a rotating object. In rotation, force is replaced with torque; acceleration is replaced with rotational acceleration, and mass is replaced with the moment of inertia. More so, Newtons second law of rotation states that torque is equal to the moment of inertia multiplied by rotational acceleration. Therefore the objects mass, radius, and inertia constant determine the moment of inertia. While the mass and the radius can easily be determined by weighing and measuring, the inertia constant of a flywheel is shape dependant. The flywheel come in either of the two shapes of a ring, with inertia constant of 1.0, or as a disc with 0.5 inertia constant and the difference in constant as a result that all the mass in a ring is concentrated at its circumference, while the mass of a disc is evenly distributed from the centre to the outside. The second moment of mass or moment of inertia is a property of a body which arises naturally when deriving the dynamic equations for a rigid body as the

m r

i i

term. The mass of a body is the material content of a body while the

second moment of mass describes how the material or matter is distributed relative to some axis. If all the mass is situated near the axis, the ri terms will be small while the ri term will be large if the same mass will be distributed far away from the axis.

ENGINEERING DYNAMICS (Determination of the second Moment of Mass of a Flywheel)

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