ENERGY CONSERVATION BY DESIGN OPTIMIZATION OF FLYWHEEL USING FLOWER POLLINATION ALGORITHM
P. Sabarinath, R. Karthick, M.R. Thansekhar, R. Saravanan · 2015
A flywheel is a heavy rotating mass which acts as a reservoir of energy, placed between the power source and the driven machine. Whenever there is excess or deficit of energy in power source, the speed of the driven machine will fluctuate. This fluctuation of speed can be controlled by the flywheel within a certain range. In this work, minimizing the weight of a flywheel has been performed and thereby energy conservation is achieved. Several traditional methods like dynamic programming have been used in the past, to solve such problems. But traditional techniques have some drawbacks. For example, there is a chance that the solutions may get fascinated within local minima. Thus, there is still a need for a versatile algorithm to solve various optimization problems. In this work, Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA), one of the recent non – traditional optimization techniques is used to solve the above mentioned problem. The results obtained by FPA approach is compared with that of the results presented in the literature and, in most cases FPA results are better in terms of precision and convergence.