Accelerated simulation of complex aircraft electrical power system under normal and faulty operational scenarios

Abstract

The more-electric aircraft concept (MEA) is one of the major trends in modern aircraft electric power system (EPS) engineering. The concept results in a significantly increased number of onboard loads driven by power-electronics. Development of appropriate EPS architectures, ensuring the power system integrity and assessment of overall system quality and performance under possible normal and abnormal scenarios requires extensive simulation activity. At the same time, the increased use of tightly-controlled motor drives and power electronic converters can make the simulation of the large-scale EPS impractical due to enormous computation time or numerical non-convergence due to the model complexity. Hence, there is a strong demand for accurate but time-efficient modeling techniques for MEA EPS simulations. This paper reports the development of a functional models library capable of maintaining good accuracy up to a specified frequency range. The library is applied to study the performance of a twin-generator example EPS under both normal and faulty regimes. The attained improvement in simulation time confirms the performance of the developed functional models for the study of complex MEA EPS architectures.