A method for the detection of series arc faults in DC aircraft power networks

On up-to-date aircrafts the electric power system is a very complex and crucial system, since great part of the equipment requires power supply. Its protection is a critical task as a fault may be catastrophic if it is not quickly detected and isolated. Thermal magnetic breakers or fuses are commonly employed to provide overload and short circuit protection. Unfortunately they are not effective in detecting other dangerous faults such as electrical arcs. In the last decades many systems able to detect series and parallel arcs have been developed. Most of them are complex devices that involve custom hardware and high computational burden. In this paper the authors propose a method for the identification of the series arcs in DC power systems which is based on a simple analysis of the current signal and on the evaluation of the energy related to the arc itself. In the paper the developed technique and the related experimental results are presented.