Experimental verification of flywheel power leveling system oriented to low cost and general purpose use

This paper discusses the performances of a power leveling system with a 3.0-MJ, 9500-r/min flywheel energy storage. In term of the cost reduction, this system uses low cost flywheel and the general purpose products. Therefore, time delay that occurs in the measurement circuit can limit the control performance. In order to overcome this problem, a time delay compensation scheme based on Smith predictor is applied in order to improve the control performance. In addition, vibration characteristics during power leveling operation are evaluated in the experiment. From the results, the maximum value of the vibration velocity is 2.4 mm/s. It was confirmed that the vibration level of the proposed system is significantly low.