Water Containment Systems for Testing High-Speed Flywheels

Water-filled containers are used as building blocks in a new generation of containment systems for testing high-speed flywheels. Such containment systems are needed to ensure safety by trapping high-speed debris in the event of centrifugal breakup or bearing failure. Traditional containment systems for testing flywheels consist mainly of thick steel rings. While steel rings are effective for protecting against fragments from conventional and relatively simple metal flywheels, they are also expensive. Moreover, it is difficult and expensive to configure steel-ring containment systems for testing of advanced flywheel systems that can include flywheels made of composite materials, counter-rotating flywheels, and/or multiple flywheels rotating about different axes. In contrast, one can quickly, easily, and inexpensively stack water-filled containers like bricks to build walls, (and, if needed, floors, and ceilings) of sufficient thickness to trap debris traveling in any debris traveling in any possible direction at the maximum possible kinetic energy that could be encountered in testing a given flywheel system.