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Future aircraft systems are projected to have order of magnitude greater power and thermal demands, along with tighter constraints on the performance of the power and thermal management subsystems. This trend has led to the need for a fully integrated design process where power and thermal systems, and their interactions, are considered simultaneously. To support this new design paradigm, a general framework for codifying and checking specifications and requirements is presented. This framework is domain independent and can be used to translate requirement language into a structured definition that can be quickly queried and applied to simulation and measurement data. It is constructed by generalizing a previously developed power quality analysis framework. The application of this framework is demonstrated through the translation of thermal specifications for airborne electrical equipment, into the SPecification And Requirement Evaluation (SPARE) Tool.

Experimental Hardware-in-the-loop (xHIL) testing utilizing signal and/or power emulation imposes a hard real-time requirement on models of emulated subsystems, directly limiting their fidelity to what can be achieved in real-time on the available computational resources. Most real-time simulators are CPU-based, for which the overhead of an instruction-set architecture imposes a lower limit on the simulation step size, resulting in limited model bandwidth. For power-electronic systems with high-frequency switching, this limit often necessitates using average-value models, significantly reducing fidelity, in order to meet the real-time requirement. An alternative approach emerging recently is to use FPGAs as the computational platform, which, although offering orders-of-magnitudes faster execution due to their parallel architecture, they are more difficult to program and their limited fabric space bounds the size of models that can be simulated.

Advancements in electrical, mechanical, and structural design onboard modern more electric aircraft have added significant stress to the electrical systems. An electrical system level analysis tool has been created in MATLAB/Simulink to facilitate rapid system analysis and optimization to meet the growing demands of modern aircraft. An integratated model of segment level models of an electrical system including a generator, electrical accumulator unit, electrical distribution unit and electromechanical actuators has been developed. Included in the model are mission level models of an engine and aircraft to provide relevant boundary conditions. It is anticipated that the tracking of the electrical distribution through numerical integration of these various subsystems will lead to more accurate predictions of the bus power quality. In this paper the tool is used to evaluate two architectures using two different load profiles.

In this paper, a MATLAB-Simulink based general co-simulation approach is presented which supports multi-resolution simulation of distributed models in an integrated architecture. This approach was applied to simulating aircraft thermal performance in our Vehicle Systems Model Integration (VSMI) framework. A representative advanced aircraft thermal management system consisting of an engine, engine fuel thermal management system, aircraft fuel thermal management system and a power and thermal management system was used to evaluate the advantages and tradeoffs in using a co-simulation approach to system integration modeling. For a system constituting of multiple interacting sub-systems, an integrated model architecture can rapidly, and cost effectively address technology insertions and system evaluations. Utilizing standalone sub-system models with table-based boundary conditions often fails to effectively capture dynamic subsystem interactions that occurs in an integrated system.

Future more electric aircraft (MEA) architectures that improve electrical power system's (EPS's) source and load utilization will require advance stability analysis capabilities. Systems are becoming more complex with bidirectional flows from power regeneration, multiple sources per channel and higher peak to average power ratios. Unknown load profiles with large transients complicate common stability analysis techniques. Advancements in analysis are critical for providing useful feedback to the system integrator and designers of multi-source, multi-load power systems. Overall, a framework for evaluating stability with large displacement events has been developed. Within this framework, voltage transient bounds are obtained by identifying the worst case load profile. The results can be used by system designers or integrators to provide specifications or limits to suppliers. Subsystem suppliers can test and evaluate their design prior to integration and hardware development.

Analyzing and maintaining power quality in an electrical power system (EPS) is essential to ensure that power generation, distribution, and loads function as expected within their designated operating regimes. Standards such as MIL-STD-704 and associated documents provide the framework for power quality metrics that need to be satisfied under varying operating conditions. However, analyzing these power quality metrics within a fully integrated EPS based solely on measurements of relevant signals is a different challenge that requires a separate framework containing rules for data acquisition, metric calculations, and applicability of metrics in certain operating conditions/modes. Many EPS employed throughout industry and government feature various alternating-current (ac) power systems.

Design of modern aircraft relies heavily on modeling and simulation for reducing cost and improving performance. However, the complexity of aircraft architectures requires accurate modeling of dynamic components across many subsystems. Integrated power and thermal modeling necessitates dynamic simulations of liquid, air, and two-phase fluids within vapor cycle system components, air cycle machine and propulsion components, hydraulic components, and more while heat generation of many on-board electrical components must also be precisely calculated as well. Integration of these highly complex subsystems may result in simulations which are too computationally expensive for quickly modeling extensive variations of aircraft architecture, or will require simulations with reduced accuracy in order to provide computationally inexpensive models.

Advancement in modern aircraft with the development of more dynamic and efficient technologies has led to these technologies increasingly operated near or at their operation limits. More comprehensive analysis methods based on high-fidelity models co-simulated in an integrated environment are needed to support the full utilization of these advanced technologies. Furthermore, the additional information provided by these new analyses needs to be correlated with updates to traditional metrics and specifications. One such case is the thermal limit requirement that sets the upper bound on a thermal system temperature. Traditionally, this bound is defined based on steady-state conditions. However, advanced thermal management systems experience dynamic events where the temperature is not static and may violate steady-state requirements for brief periods of time.