New kind of flywheel
Are there any super-serious tuners here... as in compete at a national level, and willing to spend 20 grand to research an idea?
Maybe somebody has already thought of this, and the mod I'm thinking about has already been banned or put in a special class... so be it...
Fast93Accord said something in another thread that gave me this idea. His statement was "Dont go too lite with your flywheel weight if you plan to drag race". So I started thinking about the benefits of going light or heavy and how that would affect drag racing...
Which got me to thinking...
For that initial bump from a standing start to getting the car rolling, waiting to get off the drag start line, a racer revs the engine, this stores energy in the flywheel which transfers to the wheels when you pop the clutch. The heavier the flywheel, the more stored energy, the bigger that initial boost.
But after a certain point from that initial bump, the weight of the flywheel becomes a drag on acceleration once the engine becomes the main source of acceleration (or would it be once the flywheel is no longer helping with the acceleration?). From that point on, you want the lightest flywheel which will keep the engine turning smoothly at idle - so all the engine's energy goes to accelerating the wheels, not the flywheel.
So I'm thinking... can you have both?
Could you make a two piece flywheel... one 8 pound section which acts like a normal flywheel, always attached, and another 16 (or heavier) pound section which is coupled to the drivetrain only for that first second or so from a standing start and spins totally free of the drivetrain after that so it's no drag on the system.
If you got really funky... at the point where that extra weight becomes more of a burden than a help, it's still spinning and has stored energy... a genius might be able to figure out some kind of brake system which stops that heavier portion and transfers/adds that energy to the drivetrain. Maybe something like an automatic transmission in reverse. As far as ways to tie it in, an idea could probably be stolen from marine engines or anything which uses more than one engine tied to the same output. Sure, this would only give you a couple of hundredths of a second, but that might be a big difference at top levels.
Obviously this wouldn't be good for much other than drag racing where you're revving the engine way up to get a jump off the line... although I suppose you could shrink the concept down for street use.
Hey, if this hasn't been done already, and somebody out there makes some bank off my idea, could you cut me in for a percentage?
It's been almost 20 years since I read a book about this stuff in high school, so I hope I remember the scientific part of it.
Maybe somebody has already thought of this, and the mod I'm thinking about has already been banned or put in a special class... so be it...
Fast93Accord said something in another thread that gave me this idea. His statement was "Dont go too lite with your flywheel weight if you plan to drag race". So I started thinking about the benefits of going light or heavy and how that would affect drag racing...
Which got me to thinking...
For that initial bump from a standing start to getting the car rolling, waiting to get off the drag start line, a racer revs the engine, this stores energy in the flywheel which transfers to the wheels when you pop the clutch. The heavier the flywheel, the more stored energy, the bigger that initial boost.
But after a certain point from that initial bump, the weight of the flywheel becomes a drag on acceleration once the engine becomes the main source of acceleration (or would it be once the flywheel is no longer helping with the acceleration?). From that point on, you want the lightest flywheel which will keep the engine turning smoothly at idle - so all the engine's energy goes to accelerating the wheels, not the flywheel.
So I'm thinking... can you have both?
Could you make a two piece flywheel... one 8 pound section which acts like a normal flywheel, always attached, and another 16 (or heavier) pound section which is coupled to the drivetrain only for that first second or so from a standing start and spins totally free of the drivetrain after that so it's no drag on the system.
If you got really funky... at the point where that extra weight becomes more of a burden than a help, it's still spinning and has stored energy... a genius might be able to figure out some kind of brake system which stops that heavier portion and transfers/adds that energy to the drivetrain. Maybe something like an automatic transmission in reverse. As far as ways to tie it in, an idea could probably be stolen from marine engines or anything which uses more than one engine tied to the same output. Sure, this would only give you a couple of hundredths of a second, but that might be a big difference at top levels.
Obviously this wouldn't be good for much other than drag racing where you're revving the engine way up to get a jump off the line... although I suppose you could shrink the concept down for street use.
Hey, if this hasn't been done already, and somebody out there makes some bank off my idea, could you cut me in for a percentage?
It's been almost 20 years since I read a book about this stuff in high school, so I hope I remember the scientific part of it.
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