Distributed Electrical Power Management Architecture

The DEPMA project is a consortium of Smiths Industries, British Aerospace and the University of Birmingham investigating power distribution on civil and military aircraft. It is 50% funded by the DTI and forms part of the More Electric Aircraft initiative. Increased power demands and improvements in technology have enabled other ways of distributing power more affordably. Quantifying the benefits of different architectures is not an easy task with many variables and options to consider. The DEPMA project is an attempt to model the complex distribution of power from the generators to the loads so that alternative architectures can be analysed without the need to manually manipulate large databases. The University of Birmingham´s role is to model the electrical performance of the various power architectures using Analogy´s Saber tool. Maintaining the power quality is an important issue when switching loads on an aircraft