High level decision methodology for the selection of a fuel cell based power distribution architecture for an aircraft application

The selection of the right power distribution architecture for a given application has a tremendous impact on the overall system in terms of efficiency, cost, reliability, fault tolerance and size. Moreover, with the increasing number of power sources, storage elements, different supply voltages and strong requirements imposed at system level, the selection of the appropriate architecture becomes a nightmare for the system designer. The purpose of this paper is to describe a methodology for the selection of the most suitable architecture for a fuel cell based power distribution application. The methodology is based on the assessment of metric functions for all the components that can configure the architecture as a function of the electrical boundary conditions of each component.