What is it about?
Safety is of uttermost importance in the aircraft industry. Having set challenging goals to reduce emissions in future aircraft, it is compelling to explore new designs with higher electrical energy utilization considering safety as the main design driver. This paper formulates the design of an electrical system as an optimization problem in which the safety specifications are included to increase the reliability of the system.
Featured Image
Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The design of electrical systems has a high number of degrees of freedom, e.g. semiconductor technology type, converter topology, voltage levels, conductor types, number of auxiliary systems, etc. Even if its possible to formulate a design problem considering all these degrees of freedom, it could take a while before a feasible solution can be obtained (in the best case suboptimal). Following a Platform Based Design, the formulations presented in this paper allows the exploration of electrical systems architectures as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming optimization problem which has the advantage of: a) reaching optimality (polynomial time in the number of variables and constraints), b) amenable for trade-off studies, c) grounding safety specifications as reliability constraints. We have found that some formulations allows for cost reduction while maintaining the same reliability level.
Perspectives
The future of aviation is an exciting field that is demanding a lot of research and has attracted important investments to make it possible to fly with more electricity. This means that there is huge potential to explore new design procedures and methodologies to handle the complexities of developing a new 'more electric' aircraft. However, there is still a lot to do in terms of design exploration to make this future aircraft feasible for aerospace markets. I hope you find this article useful as a starting point to build upon design exploration.
Mr Angel Andres Recalde
University of Nottingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Design of More Electric Aircraft DC Power Distribution Architectures considering Reliability Performance, August 2019, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/6.2019-4506.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
