Evaluation of DC-DC Converter Topologies for a Safe Electrical Architecture Design

Abstract

The power supply to the electrical propulsion system (EPS) of an All Electric Aircraft (AEA) requires a power source. In this work, the AEA uses two different power sources namely fuel cell system and battery system. The integration of power sources leads to the scope of different types of integration concepts that define the source-side electrical architecture. A Function Hazard Analysis (FHA) is performed on the source-side electrical architecture to identify the failure prone components and conditions with their effects on the aircraft and its systems. The aim of this thesis is to investigate different converter topologies used for different architecture types, with a focus on evaluating the architectures. In this work, a two-port architecture (TPA) using two individual dual active bridge (DAB) converters to integrate the power sources into the EPS is compared with a multi-port architecture (MPA) using a triple active bridge (TAB) converter to integrate the sources. These converter models are developed and simulated for selected operation points of the mission profile in the simulation software PLECS. The comparison is based on different evaluation criteria such as efficiency, power density, reliability, EMI emission, and design complexity which are relevant to the application. The result of this research obtained through simulation and evaluation revealed that a MPA is the more suitable architecture compared to the TPA