Hybrid modulated model predictive control for the more electric aircraft generator system

The More Electric Aircraft (MEA) has been identified to be a major trend for future aircrafts. One of the key improvements introduced in MEA is its electrical power generation system. The generator system studied in this paper comprises of a permanent magnet machine and an active front-end rectifier. Rather than just using PI controllers to control the generation system, Model Predictive Control (MPC) is considered due to its ability to achieve fast dynamic performance and multivariable control. A variant of MPC called Modulated Model Predictive Control (MPC with intrinsic modulator) was recently introduced that showed significantly better performance than the standard MPC method. This paper presents a control scheme that utilizes Modulated Model Predictive Control for the current inner loop and PI controllers for the outer loop. The proposed control is compared with a full cascaded PI control scheme. Simulation tests are carried out to compare the two control methods and the results are presented and analysed.