HTS Inductive Energy Charging and Discharging Circuit and its Application in the Design of SMES UPS

Abstract

In this era of high technological development, energy storage devices are one of the prime requirements. More and more focus is on designing efficient energy storage systems. One of the highly efficient energy storage systems is Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage system. It is a magnetic field based direct energy storage system. It stores the required energy in the magnetic field with almost zero loss. A SMES system consist of four parts - the superconducting coil (SC),the power conditioning system (PCS), the cryogenically cooled refrigerator (CS) or the cryogenic system and the cooling unit (CU). Since superconductors practically offer almost no resistance to current flow, energy can be stored indefinitely in the magnetic field owing to the reason that the direct current will not decay once the coil is charged. The stored energy can be supplied to the network by discharging the same coil. The present work basically deals with the study of various energy storage systems and comparing their performance and control characteristics. Also detailed modelling of the charging and discharging SMES circuit on different inductance and reference voltage values has been done. The reliability of the HTS inductors in the field of electrical design has been presented. In the present work, the aim is to build SMES UPS (Uninterruptible power source) so as to store energy for longer periods. The design is done using SIMULINK/MATLAB.