Abstract
Modern electrical machines employed in transportation applications are required to provide high performance in terms of power (and torque) density. At the same time, being these applications safety-critical, a significant level of reliability and/or fault tolerance is expected. Among all the factors which can compromise motors reliability, partial discharges (PDs) inception is one of the most crucial, in particular for low voltage, random wound machines. This article presents an extensive experimental investigation on PDs in electrical machines for aerospace applications. Measurements are carried out using both sinusoidal and fast-rising pulses in a representative aerospace environment, emulating the typical ambient conditions encountered throughout a commercial aircraft mission, and beyond (i.e., down to 30 mbar). As a main result of the investigation, it is proved that electrical machines employed for actuating primary flight control surfaces feature a higher risk of PDs inception. Therefore, their insulation system demands an extremely careful design.
Highlights
Insulation related problems represent one the main causes leading to premature failures in electrical machines
Most airports are located slightly above sea level altitude. This indicates that the variation in operating pressure is not a design constraint for the insulation system of landing gear actuation motors and the same is valid for taxiing systems [14]
The partial discharge inception voltage (PDIV) of winding samples for low voltage, random wound electrical machines is experimentally measured in emulated aerospace environment
Summary
Insulation related problems represent one the main causes leading to premature failures in electrical machines. Type-I-insulated motors should be designed to be PD-free throughout their whole lifetime Despite this criticality, organic-insulated machines are largely adopted in a wide range of applications, some of which are safety-critical Various investigations have been carried out on PD analysis for insulation systems of Type-I machines [2, 8, 9], only few of them refer to motors for aerospace applications [10,11,12]. The identification of the specific operating environment (i.e. temperature and pressure) for all the main electrical machines within a MEA; 2. The presentation of experimentally measured PD datasets (i.e. inception voltage) on motor winding specimens, carried out in representative aerospace environment, adopting both sinusoidal and square waveform excitation; 3.
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