flywheel
Pluralflywheels
- 1A heavy rotating mass that keeps a machine's speed within set limits as it gains or releases energy unevenly, or that holds energy for later use.
Like a potter's wheel that keeps spinning smoothly between kicks, carrying the motion forward.
Mechanics replaced the cracked flywheel before the motor would run evenly again.
Some buses recover braking energy by spinning up a flywheel and drawing on it later.
Note
The whole idea rests on moment of inertia: a heavy wheel, once spinning, resists being sped up or slowed down. Engineers speak of energy stored in a flywheel, and the scale can be striking. Charles E. Lee's "The Glasgow Underground Railway" (Railway Magazine, 1955) describes flywheels 25 feet across, weighing 50 tons each. The name is plain compounding: fly plus wheel.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with flywheel, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origin
Formed by combining "fly" and "wheel."