• Composites Research
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.45-54
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• 2005

The delamination in the filament-wound composite flywheel rotor often lowers the performance of the flywheel energy storage system. A conventional ring type hub usually causes tensile stresses on the inner surface of the composite rotor, resulting in lowering the maximum rotational speed of the rotor. In this work, the stress and strain distributions within a hybrid composite rotor were derived from the two-dimensional governing equation with the specified boundary conditions, and an optimum pressure at the inner surface of the rotor was proposed to minimize the strength ratio and maximize the storage energy. A split type hub was introduced to apply the calculated optimum pressure at the inner surface, and a spin test was performed up to 40,000 rpm to demonstrate the performance of the split type hub with radial and circumferential strains measured using a wireless telemetry system. From the analysis and the test, it was found that the split type hub successfully generates a compressive pressure on the inner surface of the rotor, which can enhance the performance of the composite rotor by lowering the strength ratio within the rotor.