Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications

In this doctoral thesis, methods to design high reliability power converters for mission critical aerospace applications are studied. Aircraft platforms are increasingly being electrified necessitating usage of power converters for interfacing on-board sources and loads. Reliability of power convert...

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Main Author: Harikumaran, Jayakrishnan
Format: Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
Language:English
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/71846/
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author Harikumaran, Jayakrishnan
author_facet Harikumaran, Jayakrishnan
author_sort Harikumaran, Jayakrishnan
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description In this doctoral thesis, methods to design high reliability power converters for mission critical aerospace applications are studied. Aircraft platforms are increasingly being electrified necessitating usage of power converters for interfacing on-board sources and loads. Reliability of power converter systems is a key design requirement for future electric aircrafts. This thesis concentrates on predicting wear-out and cosmic ray induced random failures of drive converters. Various system voltage levels as well as two converter topologies are studied. The predicted reliability curves under a short haul aircraft mission profile are presented. It is shown that cosmic ray induced random failures dominate at higher system voltages in silicon IGBT based power converters. It is noted that SiC devices are a natural choice due to their resilience against cosmic ray failures. In order to address availability requirement due to the dominance of random failures, fault tolerance of multi three phase machines is presented. ABC domain model of a dual three phase machine is presented which can be extended to N three phase machines. The developed model can also represent fault states in the machine. The fault mode operation of dual three phase machine demonstrated a limp-home functionality by extracting torque from the damaged winding set under open phase faults. Even under dual open phase fault, approximately 25% torque can be realized using the fault tolerant controller. Furthermore, the controller architecture using PR controllers are easily reconfigurable with minimal modification enabling faster and straight forward validation of firmware for certification purposes.
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format Thesis (University of Nottingham only)
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institution University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus
institution_category Local University
language English
last_indexed 2025-11-14T20:55:39Z
publishDate 2022
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spelling nottingham-718462023-06-22T09:44:41Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/71846/ Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications Harikumaran, Jayakrishnan In this doctoral thesis, methods to design high reliability power converters for mission critical aerospace applications are studied. Aircraft platforms are increasingly being electrified necessitating usage of power converters for interfacing on-board sources and loads. Reliability of power converter systems is a key design requirement for future electric aircrafts. This thesis concentrates on predicting wear-out and cosmic ray induced random failures of drive converters. Various system voltage levels as well as two converter topologies are studied. The predicted reliability curves under a short haul aircraft mission profile are presented. It is shown that cosmic ray induced random failures dominate at higher system voltages in silicon IGBT based power converters. It is noted that SiC devices are a natural choice due to their resilience against cosmic ray failures. In order to address availability requirement due to the dominance of random failures, fault tolerance of multi three phase machines is presented. ABC domain model of a dual three phase machine is presented which can be extended to N three phase machines. The developed model can also represent fault states in the machine. The fault mode operation of dual three phase machine demonstrated a limp-home functionality by extracting torque from the damaged winding set under open phase faults. Even under dual open phase fault, approximately 25% torque can be realized using the fault tolerant controller. Furthermore, the controller architecture using PR controllers are easily reconfigurable with minimal modification enabling faster and straight forward validation of firmware for certification purposes. 2022-12-13 Thesis (University of Nottingham only) NonPeerReviewed application/pdf en cc_by https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/71846/1/Design%20of%20High%20Reliability%20Power%20Converters%20for%20Aerospace%20Applications.pdf Harikumaran, Jayakrishnan (2022) Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. Power electronics Reliability Aerospace power converters
spellingShingle Power electronics
Reliability
Aerospace power converters
Harikumaran, Jayakrishnan
Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications
title Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications
title_full Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications
title_fullStr Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications
title_full_unstemmed Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications
title_short Design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications
title_sort design of high reliability power converters for aerospace applications
topic Power electronics
Reliability
Aerospace power converters
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/71846/