Towards System-Friendly Solid-State Circuit Breaker for Electrified Aircraft Propulsion

As the enabler of the direct current (DC) power distribution system, DC solid-state circuit breaker (DC-SSCB) has been extensively studied at the breaker-level (e.g., topology, energy absorption circuit, gate driver, and control) with limited system-level considerations, which is also crucial. This paper provides an all-in-one solution with integrated circuitries as the fault detector, actuator for semiconductor’s operating status regulation, and coordinated control to seamlessly transition from one mode to another (e.g., normal mode, precaution mode, i ² t mode, and interruption mode). This allows the developed SSCB to limit system fault current not exceeding short-circuit current rating (SCCR) and take different responses under different fault cases. First, two improved fault detection circuits are introduced to better serve the SSCB application. Second, four operation modes are proposed for SSCB to realize system-friendly functions. Third, by leveraging four different operation modes, a control strategy is demonstrated to take different actions based on different fault cases. Finally, the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed system-friendly 200V/10A SSCB is validated with experimental results.