Feasibility of power supply over CAN bus: Study on different elementary design aspects

Abstract

Powerline Communications (PLC) is a classical communication paradigm which is largely applied from several years in different areas such as home automation or Smart Grids, among others. Recently, the interest of employing PLC in the aeronautic sector has increased. A number of existing solutions are based on CAN bus communications employing the power cables of the aircraft as transmission channel. This paper studies and discusses a close but different solution: the possibility of using the CAN bus network to both transmit data and power, applied to avionics. For a precise real case study, different simplified models are analyzed, from the dimensioning phase of the electronic circuit components to results discussion, passing through various concerns such as filtering stages design, CAN transceiver configuration and the influence of the transmitted data frame format.