Flywheel
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A flywheel is a heavy rotating disk used as a storage device for kinetic energy. Flywheels resist changes in their rotational speed, which helps steady the rotation of the shaft when an uneven torque is exerted on it by its power source.
The kinetic energy of a rotating flywheel is
Where the moment of inertia of center mass is equal to
where I is the moment of inertia of the mass about the center of rotation and ω (omega) is the angular velocity in radian units.
The flywheel has been used since ancient times, the most common traditional example being the potter's wheel. In the Industrial Revolution, James Watt contributed to the development of the flywheel in the steam engine, and his contemporary James Pickard used a flywheel.
In the world of venture capital, the term "flywheel" is used to represent the recurrent, margin-generating heart of a business.
