Illustration of flywheel energy storage system performance for engineering technology students

Experiments were conducted to illustrate the performance of a flywheel energy storage system (FESS) for electrical engineering technology students. The flywheel was coupled to a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM), which can motor to accelerate the flywheel, and which can regenerate electrical power by extracting energy from the flywheel. The PMSM was connected to a battery bank and DC motors via a bi-directional power converter. The power converter can motor the PMSM by inverting DC power drawn from batteries, and can rectify AC power generated by the PMSM. This system was used to effectively illustrate how energy can be stored in a FESS, and how a FESS can provide power to electrical loads during short duration power source failures.