Bus power control unit development and hardware-in-the-loop evaluation of commercial aircraft electric power system

As more electric aircraft power systems grow in complexity and power rating, the design, evaluation and testing of such systems become quite challenging tasks, while real-time simulator based hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technique is considered a cost/time-effective solution. This paper applies RT-LAB to real time simulation for aircraft electric power system (EPS) with hardware Bus Power Control Unit (BPCU) in the loop. The control method for EPS network based on the Finite State Machine (FSM) structure has been used to realize the system reconfiguration operation. The experiment results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the simulation model as well as the operation of BPCU in the loop.