An Advanced Power Generation Architecture for More-Electric Aircraft Applications

Abstract

The trend towards development of More Electric Aircraft (MEA) has been driven by increased fuel fossil prices and stricter environmental policies. With breakthroughs in power electronic systems and electrical machines, the targets of MEA to reduce the aircraft mass and drag, thereby increase fuel efficiency, and reduced environmental impact are gradually realized. To meet the increasing demand of electric power on MEA, an advanced power generation architecture (APGA) is investigated in this article. In the APGA, the engine driven parallel connected generators feed power to a common DC bus, and a back-to-back (B2B) converter is used for electrical power transfer between the engine high-pressure (HP) and low-pressure (LP) channels. APGA has the benefits of increasing compressor surge margin and improving generation center overall performance in the aspects of stability, fault tolerance and power density. The APGA is modelled and built in MATLAB/Simulink environment while validation is performed under several operating scenarios.