An investigation into the application of superconducting magnetic energy storage for large particle accelerators, and to peak shaving in a power network, where efficiency is improved over the hydro-pumped storage stations already widely used.
Superconducting magnetic energy storage M. Masuda and T. Shintomi
Many papers have been reported on the superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES). The application of SMES can be classified into three categories. The first is for the thermonuclear reactor 1 and the release time of the stored energy is short, of the order of milliseconds. The second is for large particle accelerators: the magnet of which is excited by the pulsed power supply for acceleration of the particle and de-excited after finishing the beam extraction from the accelerator. The cycle is repeated and continued. The big swing of electric power shakes the commercial line. Thus the energy must be stored once inside the laboratory as a buffer. In this case, the cycle time is from 1 s to about 10 s. The third application is for conditioning the utility network and is called the peak shaving, s The daily surplus electric power which may occur at night or at noon is stored in an upper storage dam and will be discharged when the demanded power exceeds the average level. Therefore the cycle time of the charging and discharging is approximately from 2-10 hours.
The present investigation is for the last two problems. As for the first case, the technical scope for development is slightly different from the present investigation.