The impact of impulsive voltage waveforms on the electrical insulation of actuators for more electrical aircraft (MEA)

Cavallini, Andrea; Lusaurdi, Luca; Degano, Michele

Abstract

To reduce the size and weight of aircraft actuators, wide band-gap semiconductor devices (SiC and GaN) are the most promising solution. These devices have switching times well below those of silicon devices. Very short rise times may enhance the electrical stress within the insulation, triggering partial discharges (PDs). The inception of PDs at carrier frequencies of several tens of kHz can lead to the premature failure of the actuator insulation, sometimes in the matter of minutes. In this paper, we show the results of PD measurements at different frequencies and pressures, and discuss the influence of both frequency and pressure on the inception of PDs. Our measurements show a steady decrease of RPDIV with the frequency up to 100 kHz, and a linear dependence of RPDIV on pressure. These findings can be useful to design reliable actuators.

Citation

Cavallini, A., Lusaurdi, L., & Degano, M. (in press). The impact of impulsive voltage waveforms on the electrical insulation of actuators for more electrical aircraft (MEA).

• Conference Name: 43rd Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON 2017)
• End Date: Nov 1, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Jul 15, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Dec 18, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jan 30, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 30, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Inverter-fed motors, More Electric Aircraft, Partial discharges, Turn-to-turn insulation, Wide band-gap devices
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/900347
• Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8216759/
• Related Public URLs: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8168197; http://iecon2017.csp.escience.cn/dct/page/1
• Additional Information: Published in IECON 2017 - 43rd Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. IEEE, c2017. Electronic ISBN: 978-1-5386-1127-2. pp. 4414-4418, doi:10.1109/IECON.2017.8216759 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
• Contract Date: Jan 30, 2018