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Abstract

To reduce CO2 emissions and tackle increasing fuel costs, the aviation industry is swiftly moving toward the electrification of aircraft. From the viewpoint of systems and control, a key challenge brought by this transition corresponds to the management and safe operation of the propulsion system’s onboard electrical power distribution network. Motivated by this transition, in this work, we propose a distributed adaptive controller for regulating the voltage of a DC bus in a class of DC power distribution networks inspired by a series-hybrid-electric propulsion system. The proposed controller—whose design is based on principles of backstepping, adaptive, and passivity-based control techniques—also enables the proportional sharing of the electric load among multiple converter-interfaced sources, which reduces the likelihood of overstressing individual sources. Compared to existing control strategies, our method ensures stable, convergent, and accurate voltage regulation and load sharing even if the effects of power lines of unknown resistances and inductances are considered. The performance of the proposed control scheme is experimentally validated and compared to state-of-the-art controllers in a power hardware-in-the-loop (PHIL) environment.