Inventors seek to reinvent the (fly)wheel for buses.

Call him a real-world spin doctor: Crawford Meeks, president of Northridge-based Avcon Inc., who is an inventor and proponent of using magnetic suspension to harness flywheels as the power source of choice for buses, cars and trains.

A flywheel is a simple idea -- if one turns a bicycle upside-down, and spins around the front wheel, a small flywheel is created. The spinning wheel can generate electricity, or the power can be harnessed directly by mechanical means.

In the future, buses may be powered by onboard 60-pound flywheels spinning at more than 100,000 rpm -- rotating virtually friction-free, thanks to a vacuum enclosure and magnetic suspension, Meeks envisions. At the high rpms, the outside rim of the wheel would reach speeds near 7,000 miles-per-hour, or about ten times the speed of a fired bullet.

"If you magnetically suspend a wheel around a shaft, you reduce the friction to one-thousandth of the amount of friction present with ball bearings," says Meeks, as he demonstrates a prototype turbine that soon will be shipped to jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney for testing. "That saves a lot of energy."

Basically, magnetic suspension relies on the repulsion of like poles of magnetism. If a shaft is lined with south poles, and placed into a cylinder lined with south poles, it will suspend in mid-space, Meeks explains. With no parts touching, there is no friction.

It is only one step to suspending a flywheel magnetically, so as to reduce energy losses due to friction.

Meeks's magnetism work is recognized in Washington, D.C. His firm has won three federal contracts to do R&D on magnetic suspension, the only three such contracts given out. He is working for NASA to develop high-speed pumps for liquid hydrogen, to be used in the Space Shuttle.

Blessed with the federal dough and some private-sector money, Meeks's firm has grown to 15 employees since he started it five years ago in his garage in Woodland Hills.

Magnetic suspension had been used in niche applications for decades, but Meeks has designed a new, hybrid magnetic bearing that relies upon both permanent magnets and electromagnets.

The combination, says Meeks, reduces the size and weight of magnetic bearings near to that of ordinary ball bearings. The new permanent magnets are comprised of a special metal alloy of neodymium, boron and iron.

By ex-Hughes engineer Meeks's reckoning, new lighter composite materials and magnetic suspension technology could revive the flywheel, a device used in early autos and in some bus systems, but which has fallen out of favor in recent decades.

Old flywheels, used on buses in hilly Switzerland even after World War II, were heavy -- made of steel -- and rotated more slowly. Even so, they seemed to do the trick.

"The flywheels were recharged as the buses went downhill," remembers Julian Cole, a mechanical engineer who rode the buses (and who is this reporter's father). "The bus driver would use the flywheel to brake as he went downhill, much in manner you can brake with an engine today (in cars with clutches)."

But with a flywheel, the braking transmits power back into the flywheel, which can be used to power the bus about its rounds. As Cole recalls, the buses also stopped in a depot to have their flywheels' rpms juiced up.

New demands for energy-efficient, clean buses could mark the flywheel's revival, contends Meeks.

"The flywheel is far more effective than battery power," says Meeks, referring to a rival technology for non-polluting buses. "A 60 pound flywheel, housed in an evacuated (vacuum) enclosure weighing another 60 pounds or so, is enough to move a bus."

The concept of rapidly whirring flywheels relies also, in part, upon superstrong composites -- the rim of a flywheel will be moving at rocket-like speeds in the thousands of miles per hour. Centrifugal forces would be great.

An Irvine-based company, U.S. Flywheel, makes such wheels, but a researcher there, Jack Bitterly, is tight-lipped about the product. "It's a technology that definitely solves the problem," is all Bitterly will say when asked about the use of flywheels on buses.

Flywheel proponents note that battery-powered buses tend to be heavy, as thousands of pounds of batteries are needed even for limited range and speed. Right now, small 20-passenger, battery-powered shuttle buses are in use in Santa Barbara, but they carry 5,000 pounds of batteries -- 25 percent of the buses' total weight.

Those working on battery buses concede the technology is far from ready for real-world application on big-city buses. "There is a problem with limited range with battery-powered buses," says Deepak Nanda, manager of mass transit programs at utility giant Southern California Edison. "Batteries are in use on shuttle-type buses on limited routes, such as in amusement parks or airport parking lots. I think development of large, battery-powered buses is still about five years away." Much more powerful batteries are needed, says Nanda.

Don't wait, advises Meeks. "The flywheel can store far more energy per pound than batteries, by far."

An advantage both battery- and flywheel-powered buses have over fuel-burning buses: The new technologies are very quiet. Mounted on a magnetic suspension and enclosed in a vacuum, flywheels are noiseless -- meaning those buses moving away from a stop would groan and belch smoke no more.