A New Cost-Effective Consolidated Converter for Small Hybrid Electric Aircraft

This work proposes a new consolidated DC-DC converter with minimum components and an efficient energy management scheme (EMS) focused on the integration of hybrid energy sources for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The proposed consolidated converter has a characteristic to operate in multiple conditions depending upon the flight mission requirements. The converter is efficiently capable of harvesting the maximum power from the solar panel, and battery in all working situations. In addition, the converter can perform as a PFC converter as well during the plug-in charging (PC) mode of the battery. The proposed converter can minimize a component count having step-up and step-down operation capability depending upon the mission necessity. The proposed system employs a permanent magnet brushless DC (BLDC) motor as a propulsion motor due to its various well-known advantages and unique features. The system is modeled in MATLAB/Simulink for offline simulation first. Then, the system is validated using a real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test bench.