pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Advanced Energy Storage System for Electric Vehicle Charging Stations for Rural Communities in the Pacific Northwest

PI: Herbert Hess (UI), hhess@uidaho.edu, ORCID: 0000-0003-1099-3854

Co PIs: none

AMOUNT & MATCH: $40,000 from PacTrans; $40,000 Match

PERFORMANCE PERIOD: 8/16/2020 – 8/15/2022

STATUS: Completed

CATEGORIES: Electrification, Rural Communities, Energy Storage

RESEARCH PROJECT HOT SHEET:

UTC PROJECT DOCUMENTATION:

FINAL PROJECT REPORT:

PROJECT DATA:

DESCRIPTION: In this project, we seek to build, modulate, control, and test the flywheel that we have designed. We will build a toroidal rotor for an “inside-out” field regulated reluctance motor-generator (FRRM) that has neither electrical connections nor physical shaft nor bearings. Everything is magnetically interfaced and magnetically supported. A superconducting Halbach Array supports the vertical axis rotor. An absolute encoder provides position and angle in the other five axes. A microcontroller converts this machine information and energy flow data into electrical voltage pulses applied to a stationary core of 24 windings located inside toroid of the rotor. These modulated pulses provide both field and armature functions through an innovative current modulation. Providing energy from an external source, such as a solar panel or electrical grid, causes our FRRM to accelerate. Our FRRM is fully reversible, yielding energy to the charging system when customer demand exceeds generation capacity. With no electrical or mechanical connections, but simply magnetic levitation, our FRRM has greater energy efficiency that conventional designs. It operates with a much wider temperature range than batteries. We have all of this performance proven in simulation. The project at hand will make that performance in hardware a reality.