Neural Network Controller Development for a Magnetically Suspended Flywheel Energy Storage System

A neural network controller has been developed to accommodate disturbances and nonlinearities and improve the robustness of a magnetically suspended flywheel energy storage system. The controller is trained using the back-propagation-through-time technique incorporated with a time averaging scheme. The resulting nonlinear neural network controller improves system performance by adapting flywheel stiffness and damping based on operating speed. In addition, a hybrid multi-layered neural network controller is developed off-line which is capable of improving system performance even further. All of the research presented in this paper was implemented via a magnetic bearing computer simulation. However, careful attention was paid to developing a practical methodology which will make future application to the actual bearing system fairly straightforward.