Development of a Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed for Distributed Electric Propulsion System in All-Electric Aircraft

This paper proposes a kW-level Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed to validate the performance of the distributed electric propulsion system (DEPS) as part of the all-electric aircraft design. The aircraft’s flight dynamics and left-wing onboard power grid are replicated using detailed models in a real-time simulator, while the operating characteristics of DEPS are studied using both controller HIL (C-HIL) and power HIL (P-HIL). Some flight tests have been conducted on the developed testbed for validation.