Hm 60kg flywheel spinning at up to 36000rpm. What if it fails? I hope I won't be anywhere near the tangent
There's two types of flywheels I'm aware of that are failsafe. The first is a tape flywheel. On failure it unwinds inside the container. The other type is a system where the disk is made of powdered ceramic. In the event of overload it turns to dust.
A paper I found online suggests the F1 system uses a powdered ceramic disk: http://136.142.82.187/eng12/Author/data/2097.docx
A jet turbine rotate at speed in excess of 50k rpm. In the event a blade broke off, it could sale though the outer casing, your body, a cement wall, before you could hear the engine exploding.
Yet... that's perfectly safe. All I'm saying is mechanical engineers are VERY good at their jobs.
In diesel engines, if there is a runaway and it isn't stopped the shaft can get overstressed and literally explode.
Jet engines are specially armored not to let any part of the turbine escape the casing in case things go wrong (yet it still happens http://www.avherald.com/h?search_term=uncontained&opt=0&dose... quite a lot one might say). And quite a lot of R&D was put into it not happening.
Is there enough R&D being put into the flywheel not failing?
EDIT: my point is that stuff that is OK in a racing car might not necessarily be safe enough to put on a bus or a tram
The famous saying, "To earn a small fortune in F1 racing, you must first spend a large one." Is very telling of this. F1 isn't done to make F1 go fast, its done to make other cars go.
:.:.:
A standard durability cell for engine testing for a production engine component will typically have a ~20-30 year old sensors, and 15-20 year old data acquisition system.
F1 all components will likely be <5 years.