Supervised Energy Management in Advanced Aircraft Applications

Abstract

A control strategy is proposed for energy management onboard the innovative More Electric Aircraft (MEA) concept. The objective is to reduce generator sizing (and weight onboard) by using battery packs as extra-energy sources. The flow of energy is regulated by a Buck-Boost Converter Unit (BBCU), suitably driven. The controller is composed of a two-layers architecture, where the bottom layer is devoted to current-tracking purposes, while the upper level takes care of the safe switching between the different control objectives. Rigorous stability tools are presented for both controllers, based on the Theory of Sliding Mode Control and of Common Lyapunov Functions. Detailed simulation with switching power electronic components show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.