A Universal Wideband Device-Level Parallel Simulation Method and Conducted EMI Analysis for More Electric Aircraft Microgrid

TLDR: A universal method for wideband modeling and simulation of the MEA microgrid system in the time domain, regardless of the fact that motors are driven by which kind of converter, e.g., modular multilevel converter (MMC), 3-L neutral-point clamped (NPC), or 2-L pulsewidth modulation (PWM) converters is presented.

Abstract: The validation of electromagnetic compatibility for the microgrid of a more electric aircraft (MEA) is an essential test item before delivery for a trial flight, and it has always been urgently expected to be involved during the design stage. This article presents a universal method for wideband modeling and simulation of the MEA microgrid system in the time domain, regardless of the fact that motors are driven by which kind of converter, e.g., modular multilevel converter (MMC), 3-L neutral-point clamped (NPC), or 2-L pulsewidth modulation (PWM) converters. The insulated gate bipolar transistor and diodes are modeled with the physics-based dynamic model to emulate not only precise system-level performance of the system, but also to get an insight into the high-frequency oscillation between junction capacitance of the semiconductor modules and the parasitic parameters and high-frequency branch of other components, such as the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM), transformer, and generator. To alleviate the attendant computational challenge, which could be extremely time-consuming (if no nonconvergence problem is encountered) when solved on traditional simulation platform, circuit partition based on transmission line decoupling, Norton equivalent parameter extraction, and TLM-link decoupling of submodules from the MMC bridge arms are utilized. The simulation program is executed on GPU to achieve massively parallel and accelerated solution. The accuracy and efficiency of the GPU-based parallel algorithm are validated by the comparison with the experimentally verified model in ANSYS Simplorer.