Flywheel Idea Gets Back on Track : Technology: Honeywell and a small Washington firm set out to develop an alternative to conventional batteries to power electric cars.

Banking on Space Age technology to make an old engineering concept practical, a small Bellevue, Wash., company and Honeywell Corp. have set out to develop a flywheel system as an alternative to chemical storage batteries to power electric cars.

Officials of American Flywheel Systems, which holds a patent on a flywheel system for generating electricity, said that their joint venture with Honeywell should lead to a prototype within a year and vehicle tests 12 to 14 months thereafter.

Long involved in the U.S. space program, Honeywell has designed and produced spinning flywheels that have stabilized orbiting satellites for years.

The idea of using such technology to provide electricity for automobiles goes back more than two decades. Early tests in Europe showed the notion to be impractical, and critics over the years have maintained that the future of the idea lies in possible hybrid vehicles, where the flywheel would be used in combination with chemical storage batteries.

But in announcing the joint venture with Honeywell Tuesday, American Flywheel Systems Chairman Edward Furia said that new, lightweight, composite materials and magnetic bearings will make it possible to design a system that will be more efficient than chemical batteries.

Contained in a vacuum housing, an assembly of nine-inch flywheels weighing 600 pounds could drive a car up to 400 miles between rechargings, he said.

Electricity from an outside source would be used to spin the flywheels up to about 200,000 revolutions per minute. Operating on frictionless bearings within a square-foot vacuum housing, they would drive a small vehicle about the same distance a tank of gasoline now carries a conventional passenger car.

Furia, a former official of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, predicted that a small flywheel-powered car would outperform the battery-powered Impact now planned by General Motors.

If Honeywell is successful in producing a powerful compact flywheel system, Furia said he would hope to demonstrate “sporty, perhaps dazzling acceleration” to show critics that “it is not a glorified golf cart.”

Four decades ago, buses in Switzerland were powered by huge steel flywheels, but they never achieved wide acceptance because they had to be recharged at frequent stops.

Aside from making it possible to build smaller, lighter, more efficient systems, officials of American Flywheel Systems said that new composite materials are safer. Debris from the breakup of a wheel could be contained within the system’s housing rather than producing dangerous shrapnel, as might be the case with a steel wheel.

A flywheel system, participants in the project contend, would also be environmentally preferable to a conventional storage battery system.

Promoters of the project include Elliot L. Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense; James R. Schlesinger, the former defense secretary and energy secretary, and Michael Deland, who served as chairman of the Council of Environmental Quality in the Bush Administration.

Although dreamed of for decades, the quest for a practical electric car has gained unprecedented impetus because of California’s requirements for non-polluting vehicles in its war against smog.