TSI: Your experts in Design of Machine Elements and the second largest Engineering Analysis and Consulting Firm in the U.S. Expertise in product development, steel and ceramic bearings, flywheel battery, design and applications engineering

Brochure of TSI

PRINCIPAL INDUSTRIES SERVED
Aerospace, Appliance, Automotive, Medical, Computer, Electronics, Food Processing, Metals, Mining, Oil and Gas, Paper, Pharmaceuticals, Plastics Processing, Construction, Utilities.
FACILITIES INCLUDE
Computer Modeling Facilities, Machine Shop, Metallurgical Testing Laboratories, Physical Testing Laboratories, Technical Research Library.
EXPERTISE AND SERVICES
Tribology Systems, Inc. (TSI), is a company that enjoys a unique world-wide position as a full-service flywheel battery and ceramic bearing supplier, including the design and application engineering of cost-competitive products. The Company has developed working confidential relationships with all of the leading producers of bearings, bearing-quality ceramic materials, solid lubricant coatings and fiber-reinforced composite flywheel rotor rims. TSI possesses the centerpiece hybrid-ceramic-bearing ball precision manufacturing machinery and tooling for making high-quality bearing balls at an order of magnitude lower cost than the current market price of ceramic bearing balls. TSI also uses proprietary computer software to design leading-edge bearings and flywheel containment systems which incorporate TSI's patented products and proprietary coating processes, thus ensuring the right balance of friction and wear properties. The company is a closely held private corporation and has been funded by prototype orders, government contracts and the principals of the firm.
Bellcore recently ordered prototype Flywheel Energy Storage System (FESS) units for laboratory testing this year, the first of which was designed, manufactured, assembled and successfully tested at TSI in five months after receipt of the order. More of the same designs are having their containment system further proof tested by TSI under their DARPA government contract. Production quantities of these units up to a million annually were quoted to Bellcore and their client regional telephone operating companies at their request. The 100,000 back-up power sites in the U.S. alone, now using banks of chemical batteries for telecommunications, is expected to grow at least ten fold in the next five years, as the information superhighway develops. TSI's FESS's in volume production have only a fraction of the life-cycle cost of current batteries, approaching their initial cost, operate at full efficiency with minimal maintenance under much greater temperature extremes, and have no detrimental ecological impact like the emissions and disposal problems of chemical batteries.
TSI's patented low-cost solid-lube hybrid-ceramic ball bearings constitute the basic rotor support of a flywheel battery design that can be made in production for a tiny fraction of the cost of competitive products, such as those shown at the PowerSystems '97 show in Baltimore in October for the emerging utility and UPS markets. One of these systems was demonstrated to power a bank of incandescent lamps entirely from the flywheel, just like TSI did in early 1995 with their lab demonstration unit.
The company was recently awarded a half-million-dollar cost-sharing contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to thoroughly analyze and proof test the containment systems in TSI's commercial flywheel units to prevent any harm to surrounding property or personnel in the highly unlikely event of a catastrophic flywheel rotor failure. The analysis of TSI's containment designs have been completed in coordination with the extensive computer resources at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the first highly instrumented destructive proof testing of TSI's complete FESS units are being conducted both at Bellcore and at Test Devices, Inc. (TDI), a leading rotor burst-test facility for the aircraft engine industry.
The large kinetic energy of a bursting flywheel is almost entirely in the form of high circumferential rubbing speeds of the rotating flywheel fragments heavily loaded centrifugally against the stationary containment housing. The advanced technology at TSI in tribology, the science of rubbing contacts, was used to devise unique containment designs, for which a patent is now pending, and which are now being tested on the DARPA contract. The Company's protected containment technology is also applicable to the improved design of aircraft engine rotor hub crash-guards. Current airliner engines are designed to contain safely the loss of turbine or compressor blades, but not the highly unlikely rupture of a rotor hub, which has not been available before.
Read an article about TSI titled "All-Mechanical Flywheel Battery Technology for Electric Vehicle Surge-Power"