Development of the Suspensions for the Flywheel Energy Storage System. Design and Testing of the Controller for the Gimbal.

This paper focuses on the development of the suspensions for the flywheel energy storage systems on road vehicles. The flywheel energy storage systems are commonly known as flywheel batteries. The flywheel batteries can be applied to the energy buffer of the electrical vehicles. There are, however, several problems for applying the flywheel batteries to the vehicles. The gyro dynamics, which increases the loads on the rotor support bearing and expands the occupied space of the flywheel battery, is one of these problems. Therefore, the development of the suspension systems which decreases the influence of the gyro dynamics is valid for applying the flywheel batteries to the vehicles. This paper reveals the suspension system that is composed of the gimbal, the actuator and the gain scheduling controller. To confirm the validity of this system, simulations and experiments are carried out. These results show that the system revealed in this paper can decrease the influence of the gyro dynamics.