Making flying microgrids work in future aircrafts and aerospace vehicles

This paper concerns modeling, simulations and control design of turbo-electric distributed propulsion (TeDP) systems needed to power future hybrid aircraft systems. The approach taken is the one of control co-design by which the sizing and hardware selection of components and the TeDP architecture design are pursued so that potential effects of control and automation are accounted for from the very beginning. Unique to this approach is a multi-layered modular modeling and control approach in which technology-specific modules comprising the complex dynamical system are characterized using unified interaction variables at their interfaces with the rest of the system. The dynamical performance of the interconnected system is assessed using these technology-agnostic interface variable specifications and, as such, can be applied to any candidate architecture of interest. Importantly, even the inputs to the TeDP system coming from pilot commands are modeled using such interface variables. This new multi-layered modeling captures the dynamics of energy and power as interactions. It also has a rather straightforward physical interpretation. The paper builds on our earlier results introduced for terrestrial power systems, including small micro-grids. We show how system feasibility and stability can be checked in real-time operations by modules exchanging the information about their interaction variables and adjusting in a near-autonomous manner so that, as system conditions vary, the interconnected system still functions. No such systematic control co-design exists to the best of our knowledge, but it is needed as both new technologies and more complex, often conflicting performance objectives emerge. We illustrate the approach on a representative TeDP architecture and compare it to today’s state-of-the-art. We close with a discussion on the generalization of the method for any given candidate architecture. Having such an approach dramatically reduces the R&D&D of novel candidate architectures.