Optimal Weight Power System Design and Synthesis for More Electric Aircraft

The synthesis of a power distribution architecture for More Electric Aircraft requires weight optimization in order to reduce energy consumption. The weight of an aircraft power distribution system depends on various factors such as the functional and safety requirements, as well as component selection and location. Functional and safety requirements can be translated into a set of connectivity and reliability constraints to produce an architecture that represents an abstract topology of the power system. However, component selection and location aims to produce a solution that is closer to a final implementation. Then, this paper presents an optimization based design formulation that synthesizes a power system architecture considering component selection and location in order to shorten the gap between the topology and the physical implementation. Given the complexity in producing and solving such formulation, linear transformations are performed to enable the use powerful commercial solvers and reach a minimum weight electrical distribution system. Therefore, the design is presented as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming problem and a case study is used to exemplify the synthesis of a power distribution architecture that is optimal.