Power By Wire for Aircraft The All-Electric Air Vehicle

The achievement of a single-power generatian distribution and utilization system on future high-performance aircraft will yield many benefits in the form of improved maintainability, reliability, and logistics. It will also reduce aircraft weight and the number of skill catagories required in maintenance training programs. Current aircraft have two parallel and nearly equal-sized secondary power systems (electrical and hydraulic). Of the two, only electrical has the potential for powering all significant functions on the aircraft from radio to landing gear. However, even though electrical power generation and distribution has always been competitive with hydraulic, electrical actuators (utilization) have been heavy and slow. For this reason hydraulics have for many years nanopolized all actuation applications in which power and/or frequency response requirements were moderately high. With the advent of high specific output, low inertia, rare-earth permanent magnet-type electric motors, the aircraft actuation field was reopened to electric motors. This, in turn, made possible the "all-electric" airplane, and significant power system (generation and distribution system) weight savings. For the B-1 aircraft, used as a typical example in this paper, these savings were on the order of 566 pounds.