A developed flywheel energy storage with built-in rotating supercapacitors

Flywheel energy storage can store large amounts of kinetic energy in its rotating parts, but its inertia restricts the rate of power exchange. On the other hand, there is supercapacitor with the ability of exchanging large amounts of instantaneous power. Therefore, the combination of these two systems can significantly improve the dynamic response of conventional flywheel energy storage. This paper proposes a novel design for this combined system in which supercapacitors are located inside the rotating disk. Therefore, supercapacitors can significantly improve the dynamic performance of the flywheel energy storage with trivial effects on its size and weight. Moreover, the ability of rotating supercapacitors to store electrical as well as kinetic energy increases the energy storage capacity of the proposed flywheel energy storage. This developed system with its improved performance can be widely employed instead of the conventional flywheel energy storage in various applications. In this paper, the proposed structures with built-in rotating supercapacitors are mechanically analyzed by CATIA and ABAQUS. In addition, the developed flywheel energy storage, which is equipped with a permanent magnet synchronous machine and its modified indirect vector controller, is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink under various conditions.