Reliability Oriented Control of DC/DC Converters For More Electric Aircraft

With the goal to decrease weight and increase overall efficiency, power electronics is proliferating in the aircraft applications. The on-board ac and dc distribution systems enable new opportunities for controlling the stress for the modular power converters and therefore the wear-out of individual converter cells. This work considers the failure mechanisms of the most sensitive devices in the system, the power semiconductors, and predicts their remaining useful lifetime. Based on this remaining useful lifetime, an optimization of the system loading is performed in order to maximize the time to the next failure in dependence of the prior sensed mission profile. A study case is shown in order to demonstrate the lifetime increase of the system with the proposed algorithm. Moreover, a test bench implementation for controlling the loading is shown for demonstrating the capability of the system loading control.