Advanced high-speed flywheel energy storage systems for pulsed power application

Power systems on modern commercial transportation systems are moving to more electric based equipment, thus improving the reliability of the overall system. Electrical equipment on such systems will include some loads that require very high power for short periods of time, on the order of a few seconds, especially during acceleration and deceleration. The current approach to solving this problem is sizing the electrical grid for peak power, rather than the average. A method to efficiently store and discharge the pulsed power is necessary to eliminate the cost and weight of oversized generation equipment to support the pulsed power needs of these applications. Highspeed Flywheel Energy Storage Systems (FESS) are effectively capable of filling the niche of short duration, high cycle life applications where batteries and ultra capacitors are not usable. In order to have an efficient high-speed FESS, performing three important steps towards the design of the overall system are extremely vital. These steps are modeling, analysis and control of the FESS that are thoroughly investigated in this dissertation. This dissertation establishes a comprehensive analysis of a high-speed FESS in steady state and transient operations. To do so, an accurate model for the complete FESS is derived. State space averaging approach is used to develop DC and small-signal AC models of the system. These models effectively simplify analysis of the FESS and give a strong physical intuition to the complete system. In addition, they result in saving time and money by avoiding time consuming simulations performed by expensive packages, such as Simulink, PSIM, etc. In the next step, two important factors affecting operation of the Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM) implemented in the high-speed FESS are investigated in detail and outline a proper control strategy to achieve the required performance by the system. Next, a novel design algorithm developed by S.P. Bhattacharyya is used to design the control system. The algorithm has been implemented to a motor drive system, for the first time, in this work. Development of the complete set of the current- and speed-loop proportional-integral controller gains stabilizing the system is the result of this implementation. In the last part of the dissertation, based on the information and data achieved from the analysis and simulations, two parts of the FESS, inverter/rectifier and external inductor, are designed and the former one is manufactured. To verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed controller, several simulations and experimental results on a laboratory prototype are presented.