Improving the reliability of a future more electric aircraft DC power system through a novel topology and software combination

Abstract

The More Electric Aircraft concept has arisen in an attempt to achieve the goals stated by different international organisations in terms of the concept of future aircraft. While some of these requirements are related to reducing the negative effects of airfreight such as CO2 emissions or fuel consumption, other requirements focus on aircraft safety enhancement. Nevertheless, if the way to achieve the vast majority of these goals is based on increasing electrification level of aircrafts, then their electric power system must be reviewed and reconsidered. Currently, literature proposes device redundancy as the main option for meeting aircraft safety requirements. This paper proposes alternative architecture, which consists of merging a new source code and recently developed topology, which makes it possible to decentralise the aircraft’s DC bus, in order to increase its safety and meet the stated goals. While the new topology has been validated through small-scale prototyping, proposed software strategy has been validated in a virtual environment using simulations. The architecture developed enables a path to be selected in the electric power system: examining different options in the system, analysing which of those options are the most efficient and, finally, sending signals to configure the power system connections to power the load. Based on the results of those tests, the alternative proposed satisfactorily powers selected loads.