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Radical new electrically propelled aircraft are being considered to meet strict future performance goals. One concept design proposed is a Turboelectric Distributed Propulsion (TeDP) aircraft that utilises a number of electrically driven propulsors. Such concepts place a new and significant reliance on an aircraft's electrical system for safe and efficient flight. Accordingly, in addition to providing certainty that supply reliability targets are being met, a contingency analysis, evaluating the probability of component failure within the electrical network and the impact of that failure upon the available thrust must also be undertaken for architecture designs. Solutions that meet specified thrust requirements at a minimum associated weight are desired as these will likely achieve the greatest performance against the proposed emissions targets.

Complex certification issues aside, aircraft electrical systems possess a number of attributes that present good opportunities for the implementation of adaptive protection systems. Rather than experiencing the complex upgrade process faced in the application of adaptive protection to grid based networks, the opportunity to incorporate their functionality at the design stage of new aircraft systems encourages their use and even offers the potential to implement highly integrated protection and control systems. The physically compact nature of aircraft electrical systems and the presence of an existing communications infrastructure should permit the use of both local and remotely obtained power system data within the adaptive protection systems, maximizing the opportunities for achieving highly capable systems.

The development of the More-Electric Engine (MEE) concept will see an expansion in the power levels, functionality and criticality of electrical systems within engines. However, to date, these more critical electrical systems have not been accounted for in existing engine certification standards. To begin to address this gap, this paper conducts a review of current engine certification standards in order to determine how these standards will impact on the design requirements of More-Electric Engine (MEE) electrical system architectures. The paper focuses on determining two key architectural requirements: the number of individual failures an architecture can accommodate and still remain functional and the rate at which these failures are allowed to occur.

Uncontrolled rectifiers are featured heavily in aircraft electrical power systems performing a number of the power conversion and conditioning functions. Detailed modeling and simulation of these and other converters as part of a wider aircraft power system, whilst accurate, can be very computationally intensive, resulting in impractically slow simulation speed. One potential solution to this issue is the use of average-value converter models, which offer a much lower computational requirement and can utilize larger time steps. Of the average-value diode rectifier modeling methods presented in the research literature the parametric method is particularly well suited to system-level simulation because it can be readily derived to represent all modes of rectifier operation. To date however, published results utilizing this methodology have been limited to simpler power system architectures.