Experimental Determination of the Mass Moment of Inertia of a Flywheel Using Dynamics and Statistical Methods

This paper presents the analysis of the mass moment of inertia (MMI) of a flywheel using experiment data. This analysis includes developing two models for determining the MMI of the flywheel. The first model considers the effect of mass moment of inertia only, while the second model takes the effect of friction in the ball bearings into consideration. The experiment results have been used along with both models to estimate the MMI of the flywheel. It has been demonstrated that while the model with no friction can be used for estimating the MMI to some extent, the model with friction produces the most accurate result. On the other hand, an effective application of the model with friction requires several experimental measurements using different standard masses. This translates into more expensive method in terms of experiment time and equipment cost.