From this week's lab you learned that the change in
gravitational potential energy of a falling body can be captured
and stored as a rotational kinetic energy of a spinning disk. This
gave you the idea of a regenerative driver for an elevator in a
tall building. When an elevator goes down the corresponding change
in the gravitational potential energy of the elevator is
transformed into the rotational kinetic energy of a solid
disk-shape flywheel which can be extracted and used to lift up the
elevator when needed.
(a) You consider a flywheel in a solid disk geometry of radius
R = 0.85 m and thickness t = 26
cm made out of carbon fiber reinforced
polymer (CFRP) of mass density ρ = 1650
kg/m3. The rotation axis of the flywheel is the
center line of the disk geometry along the thickness direction. If
you want the maximum rotational kinetic energy of the flywheel to
be Emax = 200 MJ (mega-Joule), what
should be the maximum angular speed of the flywheel
ωmax?
ωmax = rad/s
Consider an elevator in a 35-story tall building driven by this
flywheel. The floor-to-floor (vertical) distance is 3.7 m.
The mass of the elevator cart is 2900 kg (when the
elevator is empty). For simplicity, you ignore the mass of the
cables connecting the elevator cart and the flywheel, and assume a
perfect energy conservation between the rotational kinetic energy
and the gravitational potential energy. The gravitational
acceleration is 9.8 m/s².
(b) The elevator is used to transport down 3 identical heavy cargos
from the floor number 26 to the floor number 4. Each cargo's mass
is 841 kg. The cargos are big, and only 1 cargo can be put
in the elevator. When the elevator reaches the floor number 4
carrying the last cargo, the angular speed of the flywheel is 555
rad/s. If the elevator is used only to transport these
cargos, what must be the angular speed of the flywheel when the
first cargo is loaded at the floor number 26?
rad/s
solution: In this problem, we have to use the principle of conservation of mechanical energy. follow the steps, I have shown below.
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