Abstract
The increase in aircraft passengers and airfreight traffic has given rise to concerns about greenhouse gas emissions for traditional aircraft and the resulting damage to the environment. This has led several companies and organizations, including NASA, to set goals to enhance aircraft efficiency as well as reduce fuel burn, pollution, and noise for commercial aircraft. The most notable electric aircraft (EA) concept is the N3-X, which was developed by NASA to achieve environmental goals while maintaining the annual growth of the aviation industry. However, one of the main challenges that EA is facing is their overall weight. This paper proposes and explores an improved power system architecture for use in EA, based on the N3-X concept. The number of superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) and fault current limiter (FCL) devices required can be reduced by utilizing multifunctional superconducting devices that combine the functionalities of both a SMES and a FCL, thus reducing the weight and cost of the EA by eliminating a complete device. The proposed control technique offers greater flexibility in determining the appropriate size of coils to function as a FCL, based on the fault type. The proposed EA power system architecture including the SMES-FCL devices is modelled in Simulink/MATLAB to test the system performance under different failure scenarios.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 5000906 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity |
Volume | 29 |
Issue number | 5 |
Early online date | 18 Mar 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Aug 2019 |
Funding
Manuscript received October 27, 2018; accepted March 14, 2019. Date of publication March 18, 2019; date of current version April 19, 2019. This work was funded as part of the U.K. EPSRC, Developing Superconducting Fault Current Limiters (SFCLs) for Distributed Electric Propulsion Aircraft: EP/S000720/1. (Corresponding author: Hamoud Alafnan.) H. Alafnan is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Hail, Hail 55476, KSA, and also with the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, U.K. (e-mail:, [email protected]).
Keywords
- electric aircraft (EA)
- fault current limiter (FCL)
- superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES)
- turboelectric distributed propulsion system (TeDP)