Overview of mini scale Compressed Air Energy Storage System

Nowadays, problem of decreasing source of natural gas fuel is well known. It is quite alarming since that it will increase makes the fuel cost for Gas Turbine power plant usage. Hence, a new technology called the Compressed Air Energy Storage System (CAES) is created. The main concept of this system is the use off-peak power to pressurize air into an underground reservoir, which is then released during peak daytime hour to power Gas Turbine for power production. This project is aimed to design a small scale system to produce 12 VAC voltage. The hardware for this system consists of 4 parts, which are; air compressor, micro-turbine, DC electric generator and DC-AC converter circuit. The analysis of the result shown that the objective is partially achieved where the system have shown that it only manage to obtain 6 V- 8VAC output voltage. This happened because of low input air pressure entering micro-turbine to rotate the micro-turbine blades. Thus, the analysis has shown that the output voltage produced is proportional with the speed rotation of the micro-turbine.