Abstract
Safety issues related to the electrification of more electric aircraft (MEA) need to be addressed because of the increasing complexity of aircraft electrical power systems and the growing number of safety-critical sub-systems that need to be powered. Managing the energy storage systems and the flexibility in the load-side plays an important role in preserving the system’s safety when facing an energy shortage. This paper presents a system-level centralized operation management strategy based on model predictive control (MPC) for MEA to schedule battery systems and exploit flexibility in the demand-side while satisfying time-varying operational requirements. The proposed online control strategy aims to maintain energy storage (ES) and prolong the battery life cycle, while minimizing load shedding, with fewer switching activities to improve devices lifetime and to avoid unnecessary transients. Using a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation, different objective functions are proposed to realize the control targets, with soft constraints improving the feasibility of the model. In addition, an evaluation framework is proposed to analyze the effects of various objective functions and the prediction horizon on system performance, which provides the designers and users of MEA and other complex systems with new insights into operation management problem formulation.
Highlights
Onboard power demands increase dramatically with the development of more electric aircraft (MEA) and the replacement of traditional hydraulics and pneumatics by electrical systems to achieve higher efficiency and less fuel burn [1]
To compare the differences caused by these factors, an evaluation framework is proposed to quantify the control results for all flight stages
To verify that the proposed method is suitable for real-time applications, the computation time for the mixed-integer linear programming (MILP)-model predictive control (MPC) controller should be less than the sample time Ts
Summary
Onboard power demands increase dramatically with the development of more electric aircraft (MEA) and the replacement of traditional hydraulics and pneumatics by electrical systems to achieve higher efficiency and less fuel burn [1]. Critical loads, which are responsible for flight safety, such as flight surface actuators and environmental control systems, must be powered in all flight scenarios regardless of high-power peaks or faultcausing emergencies. The energy storage system (ESS) has an important role in MEA, for supporting bus voltages, and as a backup to deal with power shortages during faults occurring in generation or transmission systems, or high-power peaks. Combining the load shedding with the ESS capabilities is essential for the safe onboard electrical power system (EPS) operation.
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