Fault-Tolerant Architectures With Enhanced Bus Protection for Electric/Hybrid Aircraft Systems

Abstract

This paper introduces two electrical architectures for electric/ hybrid-electric aircraft propulsion systems to address the issues of the radial baseline architecture, where a single bus feeds the four propulsion motors. A fault on this bus results in complete isolation of the bus to which propulsion motors are connected. By using the proposed architectures, the fault can be isolated without having to disconnect all the propulsion motors. This would increase the reliability, redundancy, and robustness of the electrical system, and/or avoid oversizing the components present in the architecture. In this paper, the protection strategy and action of circuit breakers are discussed for different fault conditions. The enhanced fault-tolerant operation of the proposed architectures over the existing radial baseline architecture for the electrified aircraft propulsion (EAP) system is validated for both open circuit and short circuit faults at different locations in the system, using controller hardware in the loop results obtained using typhoon HIL testbed. Furthermore, the feasibility analysis of interconnecting the individual propulsion channels to reduce the over-sizing of components is also discussed.