Integration of energy storage system on naval platforms

Integrating energy storage systems (ESS) into marine vessels could add benefits to the overall power system, such as providing support to mitigate blackout events, increasing heavy pulsed load capability or improving the propulsion system dynamics, improving the efficiency of diesel generators, etc. In this paper, the capabilities and limitations of Lithium Ion battery, Nickel Zinc battery, and Supercapacitors are discussed. Overall, Lithium ion battery has a higher energy density and it is a more mature technology, but it may suffer from thermal runway issue. Nickel Zinc battery has a better fault tolerant capability and a higher safety level, however, it has a lower maturity and cycle life. Supercapacitor has a much higher cycle life and power density, but it suffers from low energy density which limits the functionality. Furthermore, the power converter topologies are discussed. The transient stability of the power system, with and without ESS is presented; a pulsed load application is used as an example herein. When a pulsed load is added to the power system, the voltage and frequency of the system will fluctuate during the transient state, which may lead to the power system exceeding the limit defined by the class society. The performance of the power system is investigated in the Matlab/ Simulink environment, where the simulation model is built based on an existing vessel. The simulation results show that the voltage and frequency modulation can be suppressed under the STANAG-1008 limit when ESS is integrated to the power system, which is more effective than increasing the Diesel Generator size or increasing the rotor inertia. Finally, the required capacity of each ESS to meet the pulsed load requirement is assessed, where the weight and dimension of the ESS are estimated.