Sizing, Design, and Modelling of Aerospace Electric Drive System with Long Feeder Cables

The aviation industry is tending towards more electric aircraft, replacing conventional pneumatic, hydraulic, and mechanical systems with electrical solutions. The electrification of actuators is motivated by increased efficiency, reduced maintenance and potential mass savings. Special considerations need to be made when designing an electric drive system with long feeder cables for aerospace. For a given actuation requirement, mass and volume need to be minimized while obeying thermal and reliability constraints. Fast switched high dV/dt voltages applied to a cable with poor machine-cable impedance matching can cause high-amplitude high-frequency voltage oscillations, potentially leading to corona discharge, insulation failure, high common-mode, differential-mode currents, bearing currents, and reduced system lifetime. Mitigation of these voltage oscillations can reduce and/or eliminate the problems associated with it. In this paper, the details of a high-level electric drive system design tool for component sizing and modelling is described. The designed system's mass, volume, reliability, and performance figures are produced. To demonstrate the sizing and design procedure, the results of a hypothetical 3kW fault-tolerant, multilane centralized electric drive system case study is presented. A LC inverter filter is used to mitigate transmission line effects due to long feeder cables.