Electric Aircraft Ground Lab Environment – E²AGLE

• Subject Area: Electrical Engineering and Information Technology
• Term: Funded in 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513984170

As part of the Cluster of Excellence EXC2163 "Sustainable and Energy-Efficient Aviation" (SE²A), the electrical on-board network of future commercial aircraft will be investigated. The electrification of powertrains in aviation is linked to a number of boundary conditions and constraints that have a direct impact on aircraft design. Distributed propulsor drives, for example, bring about new aerodynamic possibilities, but go hand in hand with new, then also distributed on-board network structures. Here, the arrangement of storage units, the available voltage level and the control of the drives play an essential role in meeting efficiency and weight targets. Functionally, the necessary redundancy must also be provided in the event of a fault. This results in a multitude of possibilities for designing the drive system itself and especially the on-board network in terms of energy and information flows. In order to fundamentally investigate these topological possibilities and the resulting questions, an experimental environment of modular design is planned which enables the representation of both centralised and decentralised structures or combinations of both approaches. The laboratory, called E²AGLE (Electric Aircraft Ground Lab Environment) in the Cluster SE²A, offers the possibility of comparatively investigating various topology variants with a high degree of flexibility. Within the framework of the research programme of the Cluster of Excellence SE²A, two principles are initially to be fundamentally investigated with the help of the proposed test environment: - Central on-board network topology: All energy sources and sinks are connected to a common DC on-board network. This enables a flexible design of the energy flows and thus a high redundancy of the energy supply, but requires a high expenditure of cabling as well as a redundancy of the on-board network itself. - Decentralised on-board network topology: Many smaller energy storage units are positioned freely on board near the largest consumers (drives), so that the cabling effort can be reduced. However, to achieve this, the required reliability/redundancy must be established here by other means, e.g. more drives, fault-tolerant drives etc. The technical requirements of the devices needed to replicate both on-board network topologies differ from each other in several respects. The E2AGLE test bench and the power hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) it contains are therefore divided into two subsystems: The PHIL subsystem for the centralised on-board network topology and the PHIL subsystem for the decentralised on-board network topology. In order to be able to make measurement results comparable, both PHIL subsystems will operate in the same power range and will be linked with each other in terms of information technology to form a distributed PHIL test bench.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: Electric Aircraft Ground Lab Environment – E²AGLE
• Instrumentation Group: 2560 Prüfstände für Fahrzeuge und Aggregate (außer Motorenprüfstände 286)
• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität Braunschweig
• Leader: Professor Dr.-Ing. Markus Henke