Overview on Automotive Energy Storage Systems

The hybrid electric and electric vehicles in the next future will be employed more and more. Many considerations induce to this solution: the efficiency of these vehicles, greater than the conventional ones, the major benefits that they offer in terms of environmental pollution, the increasing costs of the petroleum and its instable market. A key component of each electric and hybrid electric vehicle is the energy storage system. It plays a prominent role on the performances and on the overall drive efficiency of the vehicles, therefore from some years the study of this subsystem has recalled a strong interest among the scientists, the automakers and the manufacturers of energy storage systems. Recently, the main auto industries have found join-ventures with the manufacturers of batteries, supercapacitors and flywheels in order to study and to produce advanced energy storage systems for electric and hybrid electric cars and many innovations are introduced in this field (i.e. lead-carbon battery, bi-polar lead acid battery, thin film metal battery, supercabattery, Li-poly and so on). All these attentions justify the aim of this paper that is to illustrate a comprehensive state of the art on the main energy storage systems suitable for electric and hybrid electric vehicles, introducing also the most recent innovations on this important subsystem and the next goals to earn

A Transverse Flux Permanent Magnet machine for micro-wind generation application

A new Transverse Flux Permanent Magnet (TFPM) generator topology is proposed for direct-drive wind turbine application. The peculiarity of TFPM machines is their high torque density, and attention is mainly focused on their configuration at concentrated flux. The main objective is to find an innovative structure for simplification of the constructive process with consequently reduced production costs. Many magnetic circuit topologies for TFPM were considered. A new design is analyzed, starting from a general configuration and demonstrating that more constructive complexity can have higher torque density without increasing current density and the magnetic air-gap. Design of the TFPM is explained and detailed, and a final validation by means of FEM analysis is done and the results discussed