Energy Storage Technologies to foster Energy Flexibility in Learning Factories

One of today’s urging challenges for engineers all over the world is the expansion and integration of renewable energy resources for electricity generation. Enabling production systems to deal with the fluctuating character of renewable energy, the development of novel strategies to flexibilize the energy demand of factories is a crucial task in engineering business. Beside demand side management of production machines, the integration of energy storage technologies in process chains and technical building systems (TBS) has become a promising strategy to foster energy flexibility in production systems. Towards practice-oriented education, learning factories are established as a beneficial concept for research-based learning, not only for universities. However, the urging field of energy flexibility does not yet play a major role for learning factory topics. In order to equip engineers with necessary skills to solve future challenges of increasing renewable energy generation, this paper presents a concept to foster energy flexibility in learning factories focussing the application of energy storage technologies. In this context, two hardware systems featuring energy storage technologies, one based on supercapacitors (SC), second based on lithium-ion battery (LIB), are developed for integration in the electricity supply of the learning factory environment. Furthermore, an energy management system is integrated as centrepiece of the compressed air and electricity supply of a full process chain, whereas the SC is demonstrated as uninterruptible power supply for a single process. The concept and application of energy storage technologies are exemplary applied in the environment of “Die Lernfabrik” at the IWF, TU Braunschweig.