Design principles of advanced flywheel energy storage system

What is flywheel energy storage?

Many storage technologies have been developed in an attempt to store the extra AC power for later use. Among these technologies, the Flywheel Energy Storage (FES) system has emerged as one of the best options. This paper presents a conceptual study and illustrations of FES units.

What are the components of a flywheel energy storage system?

The key components of the flywheel energy storage system [6, 7] comprise the flywheel body , magnetic levitation support bearings [9, 10, 11], high-efficiency electric motors [12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18], power electronic conversion equipment, and vacuum containers.

How can flywheels be more competitive to batteries?

The use of new materials and compact designs will increase the specific energy and energy density to make flywheels more competitive to batteries. Other opportunities are new applications in energy harvest, hybrid energy systems, and flywheel’s secondary functionality apart from energy storage.

What is a flywheel system?

Flywheel systems are composed of various materials including those with steel flywheel rotors and resin/glass or resin/carbon-fiber composite rotors. Flywheels store rotational kinetic energy in the form of a spinning cylinder or disc, then use this stored kinetic energy to regenerate electricity at a later time.

What is a flywheel energy storage system (fess)?

According to Al-Diab (2011) the flywheel energy storage system (FESS) could be exploited beneficially in dealing with many technical issues that appear regularly in distribution grids such as voltage support, grid frequency support, power quality improvement and unbalanced load compensation.

Are flywheel-based hybrid energy storage systems based on compressed air energy storage?

While many papers compare different ESS technologies, only a few research [152,153] studies design and control flywheel-based hybrid energy storage systems. Recently, Zhang et al. present a hybrid energy storage system based on compressed air energy storage and FESS.