Optimal Electric Power System Architectures for Wide Body All Electric Aircraft
Mona Ghassemi, Mohammadreza Saghafi
Abstract
To make conventional wide body aircraft become AEA, electric power of around 25 MW should be provided where almost all this power is for thrust power that will fully be provided by electrochemical energy units (EEUs). This is a significant amount of power (25x state-of-the-art (SoA) for more electric aircraft (MEA) having non-electric thrust power) that requires the development of revolutionary AEA electric power system (EPS) architectures. In this paper, for the first time, different EPS architectures for wide body AEA are studied. The location for the non-propulsion loads and EEUs will be evaluated, the distances between loads and busbars will be estimated, and for each scenario, load flow studies under normal conditions and single contingencies will be carried out. Various circuit configurations for switchgear installations, including H connection and various ring busbars configurations, will be studied and compared in terms of power density, reliability, power loss, and cost to determine optimal architecture(s).