Regeneration of energy onto an aircraft electrical power system from an electro-mechanical actuator

These This paper considers a wide range of options for the allowing regeneration onto the aircraft bus for possible inclusion in future aircraft power quality specifications. For many loads, such as actuators, the size and weight of power converters could be significantly reduced if the requirement to avoid regeneration was removed from the specifications. As an example of regeneration this paper presents a study regarding the application of an electrical mechanical actuator (EMA) to drive the aileron of an aircraft using a real flight profile as a reference. The converter used in this study is a two stage matrix converter. The study is focused on the input power flow of the converter, showing that the total amount of energy that would be regenerated to the aircraft power network is very small and the advantage of using a bi-directional power flow converter is simply to reduce the size of the braking circuit.