Stability Analysis of the Electrical Power Generation System for a More Electric Aircraft

Abstract

Modern day advancements in electrical engineering especially power generation and management has enabled the path for More Electrical Aircrafts (MEAs) and hybrid propulsion systems. The electrical power generation in aerospace system is in itself an isolated micro grid with ac and dc components operating in either series or parallel or in hybrid mode. Uninterrupted and stable operation of these systems is of utmost importance. Known stability methods based on Lyapunov are difficult to implement as generalized on-line stability assessment procedure for such complex power network. In this paper a detailed and systematic small signal stability analysis of a More Electric Aircraft electrical power generation system is presented based on the eigen value analysis. The effect of different control algorithms on the MEE/MEA power network stability is studied using the proposed method. Also, it is shown that the stability is improved by using optimal gain feed-forward information of dc-bus currents. The stability matrix for the whole operating regime is developed and the stability margin variation for different operating conditions and control variations is presented. The efficacy of the estimated stability margin for MEE/MEA power network is verified using an Opal-RT Virtual test bed for all the control configurations.