Combined Kinetic and Potential Energy Recovery Solution Applied to a Reach Stacker

Reach stackers are heavy duty mobile machines mainly used for container handling on intermodal terminals or harbors. The increasingly restrictive legislation on pollutant emissions as well as the need to reduce fuel costs for operators motivate manufacturers to design more efficient machines. Previous studies highlighted three ways to improve the fuel consumption, namely: (i) improving the engine efficiency; (ii) recuperating the potential energy of elevated containers; (iii) recovering the kinetic energy of the vehicle during decelerations. The architecture proposed in this paper combines these three requirements while preserving most of the conventional components. It results in a moderately priced solution. Control strategies are also studied, especially focusing on the potential energy recovery system where an input-output linearization method is compared to a conventional linear controller. Simulation conducted on several duty cycles shows fuel savings of up to 18.4% and a good robustness to cycle variations.Copyright © 2016 by ASME