Custom Flywheel CAD

By Jose

Task: CAD a custom flywheel

Instead of using a grip wheel to launch rings we went with the approach to make a custom flywheel. The key concept of a flywheel is to maximize rotational inertia. This is done by putting as much mass towards the edge of the wheel as possible. To do this, a ring of ninjaflex was designed, from there, 5mm flaps were added as an experiment to see if it would give the wheel more points of contact to the ring. However, the wheel needs a center to be able to spin, so aluminum plates were added to sandwich the ninjaflex ring. To decrease the amount of mass not on the edges of the wheel, these aluminum plates were pocketed, leaving aesthetically pleasing curved spokes on the plates.

Next Steps:

The ninjaflex is to be 3-D printed and the aluminum plates will be milled on our CNC machine. Once that is done it will all be put together using M3 hardware.