Basically the title.
In: Engineering
A spring is an example mechanical battery as is a flywheel.
In theory any sort of thing that you can store energy in counts as a battery. Lifting something heavy from the ground and putting it on a table counts as storing energy as does stuff like inflating a balloon.
In practice there are many sort of occasions where we might want to store energy for later use without bringing chemical batteries into the mix.
A garage door with a counterweight for example might store the energy that would be released from letting gravity pull it down when closing it, by raising up a counterweight. Opening the door again will go much easier since the energy stored in the counterweight assists you.
You could achieve the same effect by an electric motor that does regenerative braking on the way down, but that would be overkill for something that you can do with little more than a chunk of metal and some pully or levers.
In many places electric batteries have replaced situation where we used to use some arrangement of storing mechanical energy.
Mechanical watches can be charged by turning a small knob to coil a spring. But digital watches are much cheaper to make nowadays.
On a larger scale we are are moving towards mechanical batteries again.
One of the big problem with green energy is that the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t always blow. You need to find ways to store huge amounts of energy produced when there is sun or wind for later when there isn’t.
Our current electrical grid works basically in a way so that all electricity gets consumed as soon as it is produced.
Chemical batteries are expensive to make and not very environmentally friendly.
One way around this is to create ways to store energy for later use and that mostly takes the form of mechanical batteries.
The most common form is pumped storage where electricity is sued to pump water up a hill and later let the water run down again to drive a generator.
Another more short term solution are flywheels, which aren’t suited for storing energy for long times but can even things out in the short term.
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