Safety flywheel

Abstract

An inertial energy storage device is disclosed which uses flywheel made of flexible material such as a twisted rope ring. A small number of the strands of the rope ring have a tensile strength that is lower than that of most of the other strands so that should any of these strands fail, they will begin to whiplash allowing such a failure to be detected and braked before a castastrophic failure occurs. This accomplished by the inclusion of glass tubes located around the periphery of the flywheel. The tubes are in communication with a braking fluid reservoir. The flywheel and glass tubes are enclosed within a vacuum-tight housing. The whiplashing of a broken strand breaks one or more glass tubes. This causes the housing to be flooded with the braking fluid thereby braking the rotation of the flywheel.