Digital generator control unit design for a variable frequency synchronous generator in MEA

Abstract

Variable frequency power generation systems have been adopted for modern aircraft power systems, thus, a new generator control unit (GCU) must be designed to regulate the output voltage and obtain high quality power supply under a wide frequency range from 360 Hz to 800 Hz. In this paper, a dual digital signal processor (DSP) structure-based GCU was proposed. Multi-loop control structure was adopted with the controller parameters varying adaptively at different working conditions to obtain better performance. Different root-mean-square (RMS) calculation algorithms have been compared and the final RMS calculation scheme was determined to realize the trade-off between accuracy and computing efficiency. Experimental results show considerable performance improvements of the generator output voltage under various operating conditions with the proposed GCU.