During a 3-week period in January 2020 students in Sustainable Energy Design are designing, fabricating, testing and modelling energy storages.
Storage of energy is one of the potential solutions for increasing the sustainability of the energy system. The design of such technologies require careful investigation of application areas and inherent system dynamics.
Energy storage comes in many shapes, where one way of storing mechanical energy is a so called flywheel. During the ongoing three week teaching period in JanuaryThe students of Design of Sustainable Energy Systems at DTU Elektro got hands-on-experience with designing flywheels.
With flywheels, the energy storage capacity depends on the rotational speed and the moment of inertia. The latter is an expression of a body’s tendency to stay still or maintain a rotational speed.
"Designing a flywheel with a high moment of inertia is therefore an exercise in moving the mass as far away from the center of rotation," says teacher at the course and postdoc Theis Bo Rasmussen.
The students have faced this design challenge with ingenuity and fabricated flywheels from modified bike wheels, wooden wheels, weight discs and play dough, he explains.
When asked, one of the students, Emil Priess Nielsen said:
“The most important lesson learnt was to experience the physical theory in practice.”
He continues:
“It was particularly rewarding to work with our own design rather than discussing the solutions created by others.”
Another student, Jonas Mejlby Hansen, also gave his comments on the course:
“This course has been closely related to the real world, which has been much appreciated for us as future engineers. The course has given us the capabilities and tools for roughly evaluating existing and emerging technologies.”
The project is part of the ”Digital Energy Societies” course offered on the first semester of the sustainable energy design bachelor study line.
