Electric aircraft charging system : Design and experimental setup

Sammanfattning

Charging infrastructure for electrical aircraft at airports needs to be developed to avoid large and disturbing power demand peaks on the electrical power grid. One way to reduce power peaks is by using a battery system at the airport. The purpose of this report is to investigate such a solution on a small scale, to understand more about charging infrastructure for electric aircraft, creating a system design based around batteries and analyze which components are needed to create a lab-demonstrator. The design was made based on previous research on the field and about components as well as simulation, calculations and experiments. This report suggests a whole design of the electricity supply system to charge electric aircraft controlled via a microcomputer. All practical elements of the lab-demonstrator could not be finalized because of the project’s tight time-frame. The elements constructed showed proficient results, the lab-demonstrator can successfully convert a three phase alternating voltage to direct voltage, forward to a programmable load that is representing the airport and electrical airplanes being charged, that is controlled via a microcomputer. More research, testing and construction of the system is therefore necessary to test the design, value of components and its functionality.