Flywheel manufactuer Active Power has received a $10 million (£6.46m) order from a leading power distributor in Switzerland, Net PowerSafe.
The deal represents the company’s single largest order to date in terms of dollar value and the equipment will be used to support a new data centre campus in Switzerland.
The equipment will be delivered by the second and third quarters of 2012 and will be installed soon after.
“Our CleanSource UPS technology is well suited for large scale datacenter environments as it maximizes the system’s inherent benefits,” commented Martin Olsen, Active Power’s vice president and general manager of global sales and business development.
“The system provides industry leading energy efficiencies and high availability in a demand scenario, but is also extremely power dense which resonates with end users who manage large IT environments. This frees up white floor space that the end user can dedicate to additional server equipment,” he added.
Flywheels are spinning cylinders which generate power from kinetic energy and continue to spin if a data centre’s power supply is interrupted. Most data centres use large banks of batteries to keep servers online until a diesel generator can start powering the facility, but these batteries are considered harmful to the environment.
Flywheels are expected to become more popular as concerns about the environment increase and they compare well with batteries in most measures. The cost benefits are also an attraction, with flywheels used in many hospitals, saving healthcare facilities up to £133,000 for every flywheel installed as opposed to a five minute lead acid battery bank.
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January 3, 2012
Reference: US Patent 7,931,107 B2
VEHICLE KINETIC ENERGY UTILIZATION TRANSMISSION SYSTEM.
This recent patent enables the reduction of fuel consumption in motor vehicles by the storage of kinetic energy for reuse. This technology incorporates an infinitely variable transmission (IVT) in the form of an eddy current induction device (called a Modulator) coupled to a gear system to conquer the torque flow management problem caused by infinitely varying bi-directional energy flow between a moving vehicle mass and an associated rotating flywheel mass created by the fact that the respective mass velocities move in an inverse acceleration relationship.
To illustrate this phenomenon, observe that as kinetic energy passes from the moving vehicle to, and is captured by, the flywheel it is caused to accelerate, however the vehicle is consequently caused to slow; but to function efficiently, the flywheel requires an ever increasing input-speed factor from a source which is ever slowing. This always changing speed dichotomy can only be effectively managed by an infinitely variable transmission, and, other than that offered by the above patent, none have been successful for the subject purpose.
The technology reflected in this patent involves very few parts, and is therefore economical to manufacture. It is in addition, long lived, requires little maintenance, and is very durable. Importantly, this system is suitable not only for passenger car use, but also for delivery vans, trucks, and buses.
The conservation of kinetic energy through the use of battery energy-storage technology is exceedingly inefficient while such a mechanical approach is well known to be very high in efficiency. As may be realized, existing battery hybrid technology was developed because it was a way around this, now solved, torque-management problem. As these complicated and costly battery-related electric energy arrangements only avoid, and do not solve this problem, the penalty for this has been the great loss of efficiency as compared to a mechanical storage system such as that proposed by the subject patent.
Thank you,
South Essex Engineering