Electric Aircraft Health Management Algorithms and Infrastructure

The proposed Phase I effort will focus on the development and implementation of component and system-wide failure and degradation detection techniques for electrifiedcal aircraft propulsion (EAP) systems built upon an infrastructure of advanced control devices. Reliable accurate data collection from across the system is necessary to enable system-wide health management and prognostics for predictive maintenance. PCKA’s Intelligent, expandable Point-of-Load Electrical System (IPoLES) initiative will provide the infrastructure required for this development. Under the IPoLES effort, PCKA has developed and demonstrated the use of 270V/120A smart solid statesolid-state rectifiers with high-speed sensing and communication to enable local and coordinated control and protections with improved fault mitigation performance (compared to traditional approaches). The main objectives of the proposed Phase I effort are to 1) determine requirements for electrical noise resilience and sensing, processing, and communication requirements for health management algorithms, 2) develop and implement HMAS algorithms on the IPoLES devices, and finally 3) to demonstrate the HMAS algorithms on IPoLES hardware. PCKA has performed prior work on failure identification in converters and generators under NASA SBIR and STTR programs. The approaches utilize voltage- and power- spectrum metrics to distinguish fault types within the devices, and the selected metrics are well-suited to the sensing and processing capabilities of IPoLES devices. These techniques will likely form the basis for Phase I demonstration, while more expansive analyses of component and system-wide algorithms and their sensing and processing requirements are completed.