A Direct Current Power System Testbed for a More Electric Aircraft Application

The design concept of more electric aircraft requires a systematic migration of pneumatic- and hydraulically driven loads to electrically driven counterparts. Such transformation demands the synthesis of highly reliable power distribution systems that increase the power availability at load terminals. Having explored the synthesis of such architectures at a functional level by solving an optimization-based design formulation that complies to a set of functional and safety specifications, significant design and verification efforts are essential to produce a solution at the physical level that could be tested for optimal performance on a real aircraft. The development of a physical setup that captures the architectural and functional behavior could provide valuable performance indications for a range of power management and reconfiguration strategies still under early research. Such a testbed allows investigation of control techniques and their impact in a real-time. Hence, pledging to validate the theoretical design, we propose a scaled-down power system testbed built on commercially available electronic components that can be used to evaluate the system’s performance and reliability on several control techniques. The convenience and limitations of such testbed are explored with the analysis of several failure scenarios and operating conditions.