Power electronic converters for avionic application
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Date
2025-04-17
Authors
Bhattacharya, Sumantra
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Publication Type
Dissertation
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Abstract
Aviation is one of the leading sources of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the world. Therefore, full-electric aircraft are garnering a lot of attention from researchers, as they are seen as the inevitable future of the aviation industry if we are to move forward to an emission-free world. Today, hybrid-electric aircraft often employ a hybrid drive train using green energy sources such as batteries and fuel cells. Efficient and robust power electronic converters are vital to the success of the electrification of aircraft. This thesis presents three DC–DC converter concepts that are suitable for avionic applications. The first converter described in this thesis is a 3.0 kW LLC converter that was designed for high-voltage to low-voltage conversion with a very high current output. An experimental prototype was built to verify the operating principle. The second converter looked at ways to make LLC converters fault tolerant. In aerospace applications, a fault-tolerant topology is highly desirable to reduce the need for redundant components and weight by removing backup systems. To solve this issue, a new LLC-based converter with a reconfigurable fault-tolerant architecture was developed. With the help of a specially designed secondary side, the proposed converter can reconfigure itself so that even if one of the semiconductor switches permanently fails, the converter can still maintain power at nominal voltage levels, ensuring that the vital functionality of the aircraft is preserved. Finally, a 2.0 kW experimental prototype is built to verify and demonstrate the operation of the proposed reconfigurable LLC converter. In the final part of the thesis, a multi-input, multiport DC-DC converter was proposed. Integrating different voltage sources (such as fuel cells and batteries) to supply power to different loads at different voltage levels and controlling the flow of power is an arduous task. Currently, this is achieved by using a combination of complex passive circuitry and DC-DC converters. As a solution, a new galvanically isolated DC-DC converter topology is proposed that integrates a battery and fuel cells as input sources and is capable of supplying power to a high-voltage (HV) load and a low-voltage (LV) load simultaneously. This converter offers flexibility in terms of the direction of power from sources to the load, between sources, and in the reverse direction from the load to the sources (recuperation). The functioning of the converter is verified using a real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test. This new concept is easily scalable and can be adopted in any drive train of all-electric aircraft of different sizes that use fuel cells and batteries.
Description
Faculties
Fakultät für Ingenieurwissenschaften, Informatik und Psychologie
Institutions
Institut für Energiewandlung und -speicherung
Citation
DFG Project uulm
EU Project THU
Other projects THU
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CC BY-SA 4.0 International
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DOI external
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DFG Project THU
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Keywords
Electric aircraft, DC-DC converter, Batterie, Flugzeug, Gleichspannungswandler, Airplanes; Batteries, Aerospace engineering, Electric current converters, DDC 620 / Engineering & allied operations