Techno-economic Optimization of Flywheel Storage System in transportation

Energy storage technologies in transport applications are continuously improved and updated to ensure energy demand, to decrease the fuel consumption and in order to make systems more reliable. Flywheel kinetic energy storage offers very good features such as power and energy density. Moreover, with some short-range vehicles such as buses or small ferries, this technology can be enough to supply all the energy to the power train.The challenges to be met to integrate such technology in vehicles are the mass, the efficiency and especially the cost. Then, in this paper, a techno-economic optimization of a flywheel energy storage system is presented. It is made up of a flywheel, a permanent magnet synchronous machine and a power converter. For each part of the system, physical and economical models are proposed. Finally, an economic optimization is done on a short-range ship profil, currently using supercapacitors