Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INDIS (Indra HVDC Distribution system)
Teaser
The situation to be solved by the INDIS project is the increase of the aircraft electrification and power increase in the small aircrafts, helicopters and new air vehicles (LR-drones, RPAS and future air taxis). All new platforms will be based in Total Electrical Aircraft...
Summary
The situation to be solved by the INDIS project is the increase of the aircraft electrification and power increase in the small aircrafts, helicopters and new air vehicles (LR-drones, RPAS and future air taxis). All new platforms will be based in Total Electrical Aircraft (including propulsion) or in the MEA concept (more electrical aircrafts), where most of the aircraft systems are based in electrical power and in some cases, also in of hybrid propulsion.
Therefore, INDIS project is being developed try to solve this situation, over the short term of new future SAT (Small Aircraft Transport) or even, over big modification in the legacy SATs.
So, from the moment that aircraft platforms (aircrafts, planes, helicopters, RPAS,..) need to kept is size, or even more to reduce size, the new electrical aircraft systems, as core of these new aircrafts, need to be as most efficient, as smallest, as more powerful as possible.
And in order to achieve these requirements, INDIS project will use new components and technologies to perform a new power distribution based in these concepts of intelligence for power management, protections and system efficiency, and new technologies of high voltage (HV) for size & weight reduction. But the bigger difficulties for development, is to be able to introduce in a small available space, a lot of smart switches, to manage/protect a lot of electrical loads (more than in legacy aircraft). In the pass and currently, these systems manage no so much electrical loads, at low power and with single behavior managed by pilots, therefore, with very low capability for automation, new aircraft functions & operations for efficiency increase.
So, the overall objective of changes toward more/total electrical aircrafts is based in fuel reduction, COx-NOx emissions reductions, acoustic noise reduction, increasing of air mobility and evolution to the city/world transport by global use of air transport for a new industrial & social revolution.
Work performed
According to the proposed and agreed schedule the schedule objective was to be between PDR and DDR phase.
And even with some delays in the frizzing of the electrical system specification, due to the difficulties to define the new high voltage generation system baseline, INDRA was working in advance over some technological pre-prototypes to ensure the maturity and availability of these ones technologies to be used in the final design and to minimize the development risks and PDR objective was achieved inside of this period 1 (Nov-2018) and INDRA expects to have ready the design to pass the DDR at the end-May/Beg-June 2019.
Additionally to the design/manufacturing and tests of some pre-prototypes (of new smart switches, HV & LV power SSPCs and bidirectional conversion stages), a preliminary safety analysis and studies of different electrical architectures and topologies were done and presented during the concept phase. So, when TM specification was frozen, the previous architectures were assessed again an one was selected as most optimum (against size, weight, safety, operability/maintainability,…) and was selected as baseline. And these one preselected, was used for development of the Preliminary design. As commented before, this preliminary design was presented and accepted by the TM and after this and up to end of this period 1, INDRA has been worked in the detail design of this solution.
In parallel to this HW design, part of the INDIS team has been working system simulations and in development of the control SW that will be necessary to be integrated in next stages, including, central and local control of the s-switches and SSPCs, central control, protections & reconfigurations and external/internal communications. Several control platforms were also analyzed and testing of three of them were done, to select the best one for this critical aspect of this project.
Final results
As commented before, during the proposal, several technologies were proposed to be analyzed to achieve the objectives of size, weight, flexibility, automation, safety and power management, so, during this initial concept phase, most of these criteria were analyze and tested over several pre-prototypes.
So, concept of high power SSPCs as in LV and in HV were validated and also matching with the concept of new smart switches.
And as conclusion, we obtained that depending of the required functionality, safety (DAL, dissimilarity, reconfigurability, protection speed and redundancy), ones or another devices were better. So a mix configuration between LV and HV SSPC and S-switches was proposed and selected.
And with this configuration was confirmed that all expected requirements were achieved (weight, size, safety, redundancy and operability/maintainability).
Therefore, at this stage of the project, INDRA can confirm that the expectative are very nice and the global objectives are expected to be achieved, but in any case, risks going-on presents and warnings and mitigations actions will continue applying as up to now.