Modeling Superconducting Components of the Electric Aircraft

Electrification of the mobility sector is at the center of attention to reduce CO2 emissions and mitigate man-made climate change. At present, aircraft is responsible for around 2.4 % of the annual global carbon emissions. This is a motivation behind developing fully-electric, zero-emission aircraft. The advantages of superconductivity including compactness, lightweight, and high efficiency make this technology a promising choice to accelerate the transition to electric aircraft. The powertrain for a large electric aircraft includes different components like motors, converters, DC and AC cables, batteries, fuel cells, fault current limiters, power generators and fuel storage. The higher the total power of the electric aircraft, the more interesting it is to use superconducting devices. In this work, the approach to model the overall electric powertrain with MATLAB/SIMULINK is presented. Within the overall model, several superconducting devices are simulated in detail. One component is a resistive superconducting fault current limiter which is modeled via an electrical-thermal lumped-parameter method in MATLAB. The simulation results are given in detail and discussed. ... mehrIn addition, a configurable MATLAB Simulink model of the fault limiter is developed for integration with wider systems models. Another model for a superconducting DC cable has been developed. The electrical-thermal, lumped parameter and two-dimensional modeling of this component are studied and its operation is simulated using MATLAB programming. Finally, the overall simulation methodology is presented and the current status is given.