Date of Award

2008

Degree Type

Dissertation

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Lin, Paul

Subject Headings

Energy storage, Rotors -- Vibration, Vibration -- Control, Flywheels, PID controllers, Electronic books. -- local, Active disturbance rejection control, Vibration control, Feedback control

Abstract

Flywheel energy storage has distinct advantages over conventional energy storage methods such as electrochemical batteries. Because the energy density of a flywheel rotor increases quadratically with its speed, the foremost goal in flywheel design is to achieve sustainable high speeds of the rotor. Many issues exist with the flywheel rotor operation at high and varying speeds. A prominent problem is synchronous rotor vibration, which can drastically limit the sustainable rotor speed. In a set of projects, the novel Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) is applied to various problems of flywheel rotor operation. These applications include rotor levitation, steady state rotation at high speeds and accelerating operation. Several models such as the lumped mass model and distributed three-mass models have been analyzed. In each of these applications, the ADRC has been extended to cope with disturbance, noise, and control effort optimization it also has been compared to various industry-standard controllers such as PID and PD/observer, and is proven to be superior. The control v performance of the PID controller and the PD/observer currently used at NASA Glenn has been improved by as much as an order of magnitude. Due to the universality of the second order system, the results obtained in the rotor vibration problem can be straightforwardly extended to other vibrational systems, particularly, the MEMS gyroscope. Potential uses of a new nonlinear controller, which inherits the ease of use of the traditional PID, are also discussed

Download
COinS