New real-time heuristics for electrical load rebalancing in aircraft

Abstract

The concept of more electric aircraft leads to increases in the amount of electrical loads, as well as the power consumed in the aircraft of the future. To utilize the power feeders, more symmetric, load balancing methods can be applied to swap loads between different phases of an alternating current (AC) feeder, or even between different power feeders. If the load balancing system reacts to measurement data during the flight in real time, the cable power losses and return network power losses, too, are reduced. In addition, the rate of power management interventions decreases. The load balancing problem in three-phase systems is a mixed-integer nonlinear nondifferentiable optimization problem, which is typically solved by elaborate and time-consuming nonreal-time optimization algorithms. The AC loads in aircraft have different power factors, which result in currents described by complex numbers. To determine a load swapping scheme in real time starting from a given load allocation with sparse swapping, new heuristics are presented. One heuristic is specially designed to solve the phase swapping problem by shifting single-phase loads between phases of a feeder. Another heuristic, based on the first one, is enhanced to more than one three-phase feeder and considers the swapping of single-phase and three-phase loads. The heuristics are tested by simulations of a comprehensive case study based on real measurement data from a modern passenger aircraft. To prove the efficiency of the new concepts, a test bench has been built, and several experiments successfully conducted.