Transient and Steady-State Energy Management Strategy for All-Electric Aircraft With High-Power Pulsed Loads

With the integration of high-power pulsed load (HPPL) into all-electric aircraft (AEA), the power supply capability of the aircraft’s electrical system faces significant challenges. Solely relying on fuel cell (FC) cannot meet this demand, and introducing energy storage devices can address this power requirement. To fully leverage the characteristics of different devices, this paper proposes an energy management strategy (EMS) that considers both transient and steady-state conditions for a system configuration comprising FC, battery, and supercapacitor (SC). For transient power such as HPPL, the proposed strategy can allocate power of different frequencies to different energy devices through a decentralized scheme based on mixed droop control. For the steady-state power distribution, a distributed optimization scheme will be added to another mixed droop control strategy to optimize the output power of the fuel cell and the battery, thereby ensuring the FC operates at its optimal efficiency. Additionally, the proposed strategy supports state-of-charge (SOC) recovery of energy storage devices, bus voltage stability, and fault-tolerant operation in the event of device failures, for both steady-state and transient power conditions. It also enables plug-and-play functionality for multiple FC, battery and SC units, thereby enhancing system reliability. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed EMS is validated through experiments on a developed prototype.