Power converters control the flow of electricity between the battery and motor of an aircraft. Once in the air, this equipment can be exposed to a wide range of different environmental loads. Key to ensuring product safety is to examine its robustness in even the harshest conditions.
Marco Bohlländer, Global Head of Power Electronics Systems, explains: “Our new Hardware in the Loop test bench enables us to commission, test and challenge our power converters in a fully emulated, artificial, and safe laboratory environment. In this test facility, we load our converters with electrical power by emulating batteries and motors close to reality, and we simulate key impacting environmental factors such as ambient temperature, cooling temperature and air pressure.”
“It allows us to rate our new converters and help understand their behaviour at the edge of the specified operation range and beyond in a very early phase of product development. That supports the quick development of highly safe products.”
The test bench provides our Electrical teams with the unique capability of special features designed specifically for our multi-lane power architecture for aircraft motors. Here, the motors driving the propellers, or the generators creating an electrical high-voltage grid, consist of several independent electrical supply lanes. Each lane is controlled by its own converter which can be connected to an independent battery.
This latest capability allows us to emulate this architecture and then inject faults into the grid to investigate the converter’s response. Our engineers can test temperatures ranging from minus 70°C to over 100°C and emulate scenarios like take-off, climb, cruising, hovering, and landing, combining them into a full flight mission.