Institute for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives (ISEA)

General company description:

The Institute for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives (ISEA) with the Institute for Power Generation and Storage (PGS) is one of the 5 Institutes at the E.ON Energy Research Center as a interdisciplinary energy research center at the RWTH Aachen. Here, all the necessary technical competences for the construction and the analysis of mobile and stationary energy storages incl. the necessary power electronics are available. At ISEA, vehicle battery systems, electronic inverters as well as electrical machines and grids in the medium voltage ranges including big energy storage systems of the megawatt class are researched and realized as prototypes At the both Institutes, approx. 100 academic researchers and further approx. 100 students are employed. Both of the Institutes undertake the data transfer and evaluation, modeling and optimization of the plants from the view of the energy demand resp. raw material extraction as well as the energy supply & economics. Additionally, central developments from the areas of the battery storage technology and energy conversion are yielded into the syndicate.

Project role

By using the operation and process data as well as the prognosis models, requirements on the heavy goods transport machines combined with those on the coupled energy and storage system can be deriven. Additionally, the energy supply and storage have to be construed by taking into account the usage in operation and the availability of the energy sources and the energy grid. To archieve this, the PGS subserves the purpose of building a digital twin of the energy infrastructure of the participating raw material extraction plants. This is done by using the energy system modeling tool FOCUS, published by the PGS. In this tool, all electrical components incl. the electrifies heavy duty transport machines, are modeled and optimum charging strategies on operation are elaborated. Moreover, the usage of energy buffers and photovoltaics are checked on to improve the energy autonomy. The created digital twin is subsequently realized and validated at two actively operated locations.