Increasing the safety of more electric aircraft through a novel algorithm in the DC power system

In the last few years, the More Electric Aircraft concept has been proposed as a solution not only for increasing the efficiency of the entire aircraft, but also for reducing CO₂ and NOx emissions. However, to purse the increased electrification of aircraft, certain challenges, such as safety, security and reliability, need to be overcome. In the literature, component redundancy is usually proposed as the only way to improve aircraft safety. However, this paper presents a method that allows the concept of redundancy to be replaced by the combination of a new algorithm and a recently developed device, which makes it possible to decentralize the traditional aircraft power system architecture, thereby increasing fault tolerance on aircraft. This algorithm detects where the fault takes place, calculates new hardware configuration options based on minimizing power losses, decides which choice is the optimal one and reconfigures the system to avoid the detected fault. To analyse whether the proposed methodology works properly, a series of tests were run in a MATLAB ® simulator. The results show that the decentralized algorithm is able to find alternative paths and continue operating powered loads when a fault occurs in aircraft DC power systems.