Rigorous Systems Research Group (RSRG) Seminar

The wide range of performance characteristics of storage technologies motivates the use of hybrid energy storage systems (HESS) that combine the best features of multiple technologies.  However, HESS design is complex, in that it involves the choice of storage technologies, the sizing of each storage element, and developing an operating strategy. We formulate the problem of jointly optimizing the size and the operating strategy of an HESS that can be used for a large class of applications and storage technologies.

Instead of a single set of storage sizes, our problem formulation returns a Pareto-optimal frontier of the sizes of the storage elements along with the corresponding optimal operating strategy.  Thus, the optimal operating point for a specific application falls somewhere on this frontier, depending on the specific objectives of that application. We present two case studies to illustrate our approach, demonstrating that a single storage technology is sometimes inadequate to meet the application requirements, unlike an HESS designed using our approach.  

We also propose near-optimal simple and practical operating strategies for these applications and provide several new engineering insights.

This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Y. Ghiassi-Farrokhfal, Prof.  S. Keshav, and M-B. Adjaho.