Open Access

REVIEW

Energy Storage, Regenerative Recovery, and Energy Management for High-Dynamic-Load Tension-Type Machinery: A Critical Review

Zongliang Zhai¹, Weixing Lu^1,*, Feng Gao², Jianping Zhang², Yanping Bai²
1 Gansu Chengxin Electric Power Technology Co., Ltd., Lanzhou, China
2 State Grid Gansu Electric Power Company, Lanzhou, China
* Corresponding Author: Weixing Lu. Email:

Energy Engineering https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2026.087876

Received 24 June 2026; Accepted 03 September 2026; Published online 10 September 2026

Abstract

High-dynamic-load tension-type industrial machinery, including electric tensioning equipment, winches, hoisting systems, rubber-tired gantry cranes, and related heavy-duty equipment, is widely used in transmission-line construction, port logistics, mining, and other engineering fields. Such machinery commonly operates under intermittent high-power demand, cyclic load fluctuations, frequent braking, and repeated lifting, lowering, pulling, or releasing processes, causing considerable energy dissipation and strict requirements for power supply stability, storage response, and control safety. This paper reviews energy storage, regenerative recovery, and energy management technologies for tension-type industrial machinery and technically analogous equipment. Typical load profiles, recoverable energy sources, and loss mechanisms are first analyzed. Major storage technologies, including lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors, flywheels, hydraulic accumulators, and hybrid energy storage systems, are then compared. Regenerative recovery methods and power supply architectures are discussed, covering electric regenerative drives, hydraulic accumulator-based recovery, electro-hydraulic hybrid recovery, DC-bus energy routing, and multi-source off-grid supply. Energy management strategies are further reviewed in terms of power allocation, storage protection, peak shaving, source-load coordination, and safety-constrained control. The review identifies key challenges, including insufficient duty-cycle data, unclear tension-release energy potential, storage-load mismatch, limited field validation, and inconsistent evaluation metrics. Different from existing reviews focusing on hybrid hydraulic construction machinery, hydraulic energy recovery, rubber-tired gantry cranes, and general hybrid energy storage systems, this review independently defines high-dynamic-load tension-type industrial machinery as a unique heavy-duty equipment category oriented to transmission line construction. It systematically characterizes exclusive tension-release transient mechanical energy caused by conductor elasticity and drum inertia, constructs a cross-domain electro-hydraulic-electric regenerative recovery framework adapted to off-grid field operation, and proposes a safety-prioritized hierarchical energy management framework taking tension stability and braking reliability as hard control constraints. The distinct research object, exclusive load-energy characterization, multi-domain recovery architecture and safety-constrained energy management logic jointly form the core novelty of this critical review, which fills the research gap of targeted literature summary for electric tensioning equipment.

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Keywords

Tension-type industrial machinery; energy storage; regenerative recovery; energy management; hybrid energy storage

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