Experimental Verification of General-Purpose Flywheel Energy System for Multiple Parallel Operations

Abstract

This paper describes the performance of a power-leveling system with a 3.0-MJ, 9500-r/min flywheel energy storage. For the purpose of cost reduction, this system uses low-cost structures for the flywheel and the components used in the general-purpose products. Time delay of the measurement circuit limits the power control performance. To overcome this problem, a time delay compensation scheme based on the Smith predictor is used in the power control to improve the control performance of power regeneration. Consequently, the setting time is reduced by 40% as compared to the case when the compensator is not used. In addition, the effectiveness of power-leveling control in a prototype is evaluated experimentally. From the harmonics analysis, it was confirmed that power fluctuation was suppressed up to 84.6%. Furthermore, analysis of the vibrations during the power-leveling operation is carried out using an acceleration sensor. From the results, it was confirmed that the vibration levels of the prototype are sufficiently low.