Supercapacitors-based energy storage for urban mass transit systems

The advance in energy storage technologies allows to improve significantly the performances of electrified light transportation systems. This is aligned with the massive requirement of competitiveness compared to other transportation technologies in terms of sustainable energy and high reduction of environmental impact reduction. The present paper deals with the problem of designing and sizing supercapacitors energy storage systems applied in DC electrified mass transit systems (MTSs). More specifically, it is shown that the optimal design of a stationary energy storage device can be regarded as a classical isoperimetric problem, whose solution is very attractive in order to determine also the optimal allocation of the storage device, as well as it takes contemporaneously into account several technical aspects in an integrated manner. Some simulations with respect to a case study are presented, pointing out the potentiality of the tailored technique. Experimental results are also reported, with reference to a reduced scale model, in order to put in evidence the effectiveness and the actual implementation of the proposed optimization technique.