Research on 270V High Power Solid State Power Controller for Aircraft Applications

The emerging aircraft high voltage direct current (HVDC) electric network requires improved interruption performance characteristics, and this motivates the fast development of solid-state power controller (SSPC). This article presents comprehensive design procedure of a 270V 300A SSPC using discrete SiC Cascode devices. Due to the high fault current and limited power of a single switch, parallel SiC FETs are necessary for the interruption of high fault current in SSPCs, thus corresponding current balancing challenge are addressed by only adopting passive current balancing strategy. Considering the high peak-to-average clamping voltage ratio during the interruption of fault current, a RC- TVS based transient voltage mitigation circuit is proposed to suppress the peak voltage caused by Ldi/dt in both power loop and transient voltage mitigation circuit. Finally, a prototype of 270V/300A SSPC is built to validate the key characteristics of the proposed high power SSPC.