Power management of DC aeronautical electrical networks including supercapacitors

This paper focuses on a novel energy management strategy for aeronautical electrical networks, including supercapacitors for fast energy charge/discharge cycles. Considering a simplified but representative architecture for a DC aeronautical electrical network, the bidirectional DC/DC converter equipment acts as a bridge between the HVDC network and the LVDC network, operating in Buck or Boost with respect to the current flight conditions and flight phase. The main idea of the paper is to let the DC/DC converter, connected between the DC bus and the supercap, being supervised in order to autonomously decide the conversion mode (i.e. Buck or Boost), in order to cope with generator overloads and reduce its overload capacity, hence its dimensions. The supervision is based on sliding mode for the converter control, whose stability proofs are given. Simulation results are shown in order to give evidence about the effectiveness of the proposed approach.