Abstract

Revolutionary design power architectures into electric aircraft system are being actively discussed to cope with the issues of a present state-of-the-art technology. The two demanding objectives in more-electric-aircraft (MEA) concept are power quality enhancement and increased level of redundancy despite of higher on-board power supply requirement throughout aircraft operation. In addressing the open challenges, this study outlines an operational characteristics of a three-phase multilevel shunt active filter (SAF) deployed for distribution power system in emerging MEA. The introduced shunt active filter is based on modular multilevel converter configuration for harmonic-current compensation purposes. On this foundation, a current control strategy for SAF is designed with a finite-control-set model predictive control technique. The developed solution provides several merits into aircraft electrical network as easy implementation on embedded platforms, controllable feature with a wide range of current frequencies, producing exact current harmonic replica onto the supply side over a given prediction horizon, and modular design with redundancy functionality. Dedicated predictive control system helps to better execution-time efficiency together with low sensitivity over the constraints imposed upon the optimization formulation through an integrated perturbation analysis and sequential quadratic programming solver. Simulation and experimental verifications for the three-phase four-level shunt active power filter are discussed, where robust behavior of handling harmonic currents with respect to the supply impedance and fundamental frequency variations is achieved, when the harmonic distortion levels fulfill the IEEE Standard 519 recommendations.