Recent Technologies and Control Methods for Electric Power Systems in More Electric Aircrafts: A Review

This paper is aimed at discussing the current trends in the design of Electric Power Systems (EPS) architectures which are intended to be implemented in More Electric Aircrafts (MEAs). Various EPS architectures such as HVAC, HVDC, hybrid HVAC/HVDC etc are studied and compared. Various control techniques which are implemented in order to control the EPS are also reviewed and they are compared on the basis of power quality, ease of installation and maintenance, possibility of future expansion of EPS, need of active power filters and so on. On the basis of the evaluation of various EPS architectures, the need of fuel cell installation in the EPS to be used for MEAs is explained and various ways to incorporate the fuel cell in the said EPS are discussed. Further the need of DC to DC converters in the power grid of a MEA is discussed and various possible choices for the topologies of DC to DC converters are compared on the basis of the parameters such as efficiency, transient response, reliability, electromagnetic emissions, size, weight and so on. Moreover, various controllers such as PI controller, PID controller, Sliding Mode Controller etc which can be used for a closed loop control of DC to DC converters are discussed

Analytical approach to electrical distribution systems for aircraft

The More Electric Aircraft concept (MEA) is one of the most discussed topics of the recent decades inside the aircraft market. It aims to enable the migration towards more efficient aircraft while reducing the environmental impact by substituting the hydraulic, pneumatic and mechanical parts with their electrical counterparts. As the electrical systems became more complex, it is inevitable the need of a control unit that can manage the EPS under all the possible scenarios. For this reason, this thesis presents different study cases that a supervisor controller (SC) unit must address for guarantying the optimal EPS operations. In particular, the SC must be able to manage the network overloads, for preventing unwanted operations or oversized design of the on-board generators. Moreover, applying constant EPS monitoring, the SC must be able to solve critical scenarios by splitting the power flow on a different path. Apart from failure and critical tasks, the SC must be also employed in the EPS optimization using a mathematical algorithm that ensures the correct power spreading across each bus. After the introduction to the actual employed algorithms and used EPS, all the described cases are simulated inside Simulink® environment and a test bench is then configured to emulate a portion of a scaled EPS in the laboratory