Performance Comparison of Active Rectifier Control Schemes in More Electric Aircraft Applications

In a more electric aircraft (MEA) design, the onboard electric generators are mechanically coupled directly to the jet engines, thus producing a variable-frequency constant magnitude voltage. This wild-frequency characteristic imposes a new design challenge on the onboard power converters. In this article, an experimental performance comparison between the model predictive and the proportional-integral (PI)-based control schemes for active rectifiers in MEA applications is presented. The comparison of the aforementioned controllers is executed under the MEA variable input frequency perspective for the first time and, therefore, constitutes the main contribution of this article. This comparison mainly addresses the dynamic response of the controllers in terms of dc-bus voltage regulation and unity power factor operation under frequency ramping, frequency step changes, and load step variations. Furthermore, the robustness of the controllers is analyzed in terms of their performance degradation in the presence of parameter mismatch. Both the model predictive and PI-based controllers are experimentally tested using a 1-kW SiC-MOSFET two-level voltage-source-converter topology.