Energy Management in More Electric Aircraft through PMSM Fault Diagnosis, Adaptive Load Shedding and Efficient Aircraft Design

More electric aircraft is an electrification scheme of aircraft system with high technical feasibility and good economy. It can reduce the weight of aircraft structure, improve maintenance efficiency and reduce fire hazards. However, the electrification of aircraft system will drastically increase the proportion of electrical equipment, the total power demand and the difficulty of fault diagnosis. This paper uses the energy management method to take up the challenge, with focus on fault diagnosis of permanent-magnet synchronous machines (PMSMs), adaptive load shedding and energy efficient aircraft design. A literature review of the concept evolution from all/more-electric aircraft to energy-optimized aircraft is presented. The main issues of the aircraft electrification process are summarized, and followed by an introduction to the current research and methods. The model of the aircraft electrical system is qualitatively and mathematically recalled, including the generator, the battery, the DC motor, the AC motor, and the electric power converter. The accuracy and computation cost of the aircraft model depends on the complexity of the subsystem models that are involved. Therefore, the level of detail that is necessary for a good precision-versus-simulation-time ratio is discussed by taking the electric system of an industrial level hybrid energy quadcoptor UAV as an example. The analysis shows that the bi-directional instruments, i.e. the electric machine, should be modeled in details while other components can be simplified. PMSMs are a group of on-board electric machines with promising future prospects because of high power density and stability. The model of PMSMs is further developed in this work, especially in the inter-turn and phase-to-phase short-circuit conditions. In case of inter-turn short-circuit fault, a winding-function-based and a fault-current-based model are separately developed. The accuracy of both models are verified and compared through experimental results. The fault-current-based modeling method is applied to the phase-to-phase short-circuit fault and experimentally examined and discussed. General condition monitoring methods require the use of a large number of sensors. A fault detection and isolation method that can have low requirement of sensor is recalled and inherited. The description of the fault phase identification index using this method is relatively imprecise, which is not applicable to the inter-turn short-circuit fault. In this work, the analytical expression of the faulty phase identification index is derived based on the fault models. A method to isolate inter-turn and phase-to-phase short-circuit faults is proposed by a combination of the current- and the voltage-signature residuals. This development expands the application scope of the original fault detection and isolation tool and improves its accuracy. The validity of this fault diagnosis method has been verified by experimental results.Load management is developed to guarantee the normal operation of critical loads by shedding some other loads in case of emergency. Generally, binary decisions are made: either something has gone wrong or everything is fine. However, different types of fault influence the working performance of the load and the entire network in different ways. There are multiple states between totally wrong and pure fine, and the load management decision should be adaptive to each state. In this work, fuzzy logic method is used to degrade the load priority according to the instantaneous working state. Combining it with the fault detection and isolation process, a fault-tolerant adaptive load management is achieved. Finally, this work discusses the aircraft design from the energy management point of view, which consists of the energy efficiency analysis and the multidisciplinary energy efficient design of the integrated aircraft system. The first thermodynamic efficiency has been widely used as a common parameter for depicting the energy utilization, i.e. the ratio of output to input power of the system. However, it ignores the irreversible increase of the entropy and cannot reveal the upper limit of the available work of the system.Based on the second thermodynamic law, this work uses the exergy parameters to analyze the energy utilization of a MEA design scheme. Based on the exergy analysis, an energy-efficient aircraft design method is proposed by optimizing the exergy lost of the whole design. The method could provide a global optimization reference for the integrated aircraft design of a MEA.Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur et technologie