Fault Tolerant Control of Advanced Power Generation Center for More-Electric Aircraft Applications

This article presents a control scheme for a recently reported aircraft advanced power generation center (APGC) during postfault operation conditions. Within the APGC, two electrical generators extract power from two separate engine shafts and supply electrical power to a common high-voltage direct current (HVDC) bus through their dedicated main ac/dc power converters. An extra back-to-back (BTB) converter is also used to connect the ac terminals of the two generators. This architecture provides merits of fault tolerance capabilities of the APGC. In the case of main ac/dc power converter failure, the system can be reconfigured and the BTB converter provides an extra power flow path from the generators to the HVDC bus. This ensures electrical power generation capabilities onboard. This article discusses in detail about the control of the APGC under fault conditions with one main ac/dc converter failure. A seamless transition scheme from normal operation to postfault conditions is proposed using a voltage command initialization technique within the BTB converter. Both experimental and simulation results have verified the fault tolerance improvement and control performances of the APGC.