CAN Bus Susceptibility to Emulated Electrical Inverter-Driven Air Propulsion System EMI

An electrical inverter-driven air propulsion system can produce unintended electromagnetic interference that disturbs the components or (sub-)systems in its vicinity. A realistic electromagnetic compatibility scenario for this aerospace use case starts with conducted common-mode emissions in the air propulsion system and its connected cable trees leading to radiated emissions that propagate within the fuselage. These, in turn, couple into a neighboring CAN bus on a (sub-)system’s PCB and lead to differential-mode signals that potentially interfere with the CAN communication. The work presented here concerns the emulation of genuine power electronics driven radiated emissions inside a GTEM cell, exposing a CAN (sub-)system and characterizing the coupling into the CAN bus in detail. It will be shown, that based on expected conducted common-mode emissions in an electrical inverter-driven air propulsion system and typical distances between the cable tree and a victim CAN bus, sufficiently high differential-mode interference can be induced to affect the CAN communication.