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need help with hard question (1 Viewer)

mr_tizzle

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You are working in a research group investigating more energy efficient city busses. One option is to store energy in the rotation of a flywheel when the bus stops and then use it to accelerate the bus. The flywheel under consideration is a light-weight but extremely strong disk of carbon fibre composite, with a heavy iron rim of mass 90.5 kg. The proposed radius of the disk is 1.36 m.

Your boss is concerned that the ring may end up spinning so quickly that the bearings would overheat. To see if this is likely, you've been asked to work out how rapidly (in radians per second) the wheel would be spinning if it started from rest, and absorbed all the energy of motion of a bus of mass 25338.18 kg when it decelerates from a speed of 15.61 m/s down to a halt.

Write your answer showing at least one decimal place.

The rotational energy of a flywheel is 0.5 times its moment of inertia times the rotation speed (in radians per second) squared. The moment of inertia of the flywheel is its mass times its radius squared.
 

Crisium

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Is this question actually under any current module?

It sounds Motors and Generators related o_O
 

InteGrand

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You are working in a research group investigating more energy efficient city busses. One option is to store energy in the rotation of a flywheel when the bus stops and then use it to accelerate the bus. The flywheel under consideration is a light-weight but extremely strong disk of carbon fibre composite, with a heavy iron rim of mass 90.5 kg. The proposed radius of the disk is 1.36 m.

Your boss is concerned that the ring may end up spinning so quickly that the bearings would overheat. To see if this is likely, you've been asked to work out how rapidly (in radians per second) the wheel would be spinning if it started from rest, and absorbed all the energy of motion of a bus of mass 25338.18 kg when it decelerates from a speed of 15.61 m/s down to a halt.

Write your answer showing at least one decimal place.

The rotational energy of a flywheel is 0.5 times its moment of inertia times the rotation speed (in radians per second) squared. The moment of inertia of the flywheel is its mass times its radius squared.
The energy imparted by the bus is its kinetic energy, which is , with m = 25338.18 kg and v = 15.61 m/s. This gets transferred to the rotational energy of the flywheel, so

(by the formula for rotational kinetic energy, where I is the moment of inertia and is angular velocity).

But , where mflywheel = 90.5 kg is the mass of the flywheel and r = 1.36 m is its radius.

So we have .

Solve this for , then we get: .

Plug in m = 25338.18 kg, v = 15.61 m/s, mflywheel = 90.5 kg and r = 1.36 m, and you get that , to 3 sig. fig. (this is the answer). Or to one decimal place, the answer is 192.1 rad s-1.
 

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