Rotor Position and Vibration Control for Aerospace Flywheel Energy Storage Devices and Other Vibration Based Devices

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