This is a brilliant concept. One of the main problems with bicycles is the need to downshift when going up hills. A flywheel would eliminate this requirement for most small hills. The downside is the weight. Added weight is a serious handicap on a bicycle.
In order for this to work, there would need to be a way to integrate the flywheel with the regular gearing on a bicycle, and a way to cut out the flywheel when peddling up a long incline so as not to increase the difficulty with the drag of the flywheel. But I can see this working. Half the time on a bike you are speeding down long hills, and on these a flywheel could be building up momentum; the other half your time you are peddling up hills, and then the flywheel's inertia could be used as a pedal assist. With the right set-up you could keep up a nearly constant speed in hilly country.
Flywheels can be amazing, but they can also be expensive and dangerous. He gets a low efficiency return, poor performance, much added weight and risk of losing body parts to the spinning wheel under his XY chromosome parts. Sadly, the on,y way to make the transmission effective is to run it electrically or with a very complex and too large for the space CV transmission or with controlled vane torque converters. Since electric is so easy and available, you then to realize that replacing the flywheel with some supercapacitors or lithium’s would be much higher energy storage and cheaper and smaller and more effective.
Don’t get me wrong, I love mechanical over electric, but for this instance I think I’d go electric.... at least at this time in history.
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