Electro-Mechanical-Thermal Performance and Stability of Aircraft Energy Networks With Pulse Power Loads

Modern aircraft have an increasing need for pulse power loads which includes new weapon technologies and advanced avionics. These pulse power loads have thermal properties that couple to the electrical system and can lead to nonlinear destabilizing effects at low and high temperatures. These nonlinear electrical stability issues carry through to the mechanical and thermal systems of the aircraft and can damage components. The load is characterized by its duty cycle, period, and power level. For a given pulse load, the system is defined as metastable if there is a nonlinear limit cycle that remains bounded within the defined bus voltage limits. Regions of stability, metastability, marginal metastability, and instability are determined based on bus voltage transient tolerances. In this article a reduced-order nonlinear model of an aircraft's coupled electrical-mechanical-thermal (EMT) system is used to demonstrate the stability, metastability, and performance caused by the pulse load coupled with the EMT system.