Source Management of Aircraft Electrical Power Systems with Hardware in the Loop Verification

Future aircraft will demand a significant amount of electrical power to drive primary flight control surfaces. The electrical system architecture needed to source these flight critical loads will have to be resilient, autonomous, and fast. Designing and ensuring that a power system architecture can meet the load requirements and provide power to the flight critical buses at all times is fundamental. In this paper, formal methods and linear temporal logic are used to develop a contactor control strategy to meet the given specifications. The resulting strategy is able to manage multiple contactors during different types of generator failures. In order to verify the feasibility of the control strategy, a real-time simulation platform is developed to simulate the electrical power system. The platform has the capability to test an external controller through Hardware in the Loop (HIL). The controller is then implemented in a microprocessor and is able to sense and adjust the contactors’ logic (on/off) based on the status of the generators. The methodology and simulation platform are thus helpful in the design of safe electric power systems and can speed up implementation.