Power management of a regenerative local HVDC aircraft network using supercapacitors

In the context of the More Electrical Aircraft, the importance of electrical energy is constantly increasing. This electrification of on-board services is intended to reduce or remove pneumatic and hydraulic systems in order to improve aircraft reliability and flexibility. The growing demand of electrical power in aircraft network leads designers to review network topologies towards new architectures with reversible HVDC network and new levels of voltage. The introduction of a storage device in the aircraft embedded system offer new possibilities to improve energy exchanges. This paper deals with the use of supercapacitors as a storage device to offer an effective energy management in a local HVDC power aircraft network. Different energy management strategies from conventional control techniques to innovative and multi-objectives rulebased strategies are investigated and compared. The experimental validation of the energy management strategies is presented in this paper too.