In recent years the aerospace industry has made a growing effort to develop a quieter and\nmore environmentally friendly aircraft. In particular, several research activities have been focused on\ninnovative solutions aimed at the design/optimization of an on-board electric system fully compatible\nwith this new approach. A first important step in the evolution towards an All Electric Aircraft (AEA)\nis the replacement of the hydraulic actuators with fully electric ones. The transition process is not easy\nto carry out, since weight, size and reliability represent highly critical issues for aircraft applications.\nIn this context, the significant improvements in semiconductor technologies can be exploited as\na critical means to overcome the constraints mentioned. Indeed, this work proposes a Silicon Carbide\n(SiC) based Power Factor Correction (PFC) converter, whose design and control have been tailored in\norder to properly supply a wide range of on-board Electro-Mechanical Actuators (EMA). In particular,\nwhile the adopted circuit topology allows for power factor correction and bi-directional power\nflow, the SiC technology, thanks to the higher efficiency with respect to other semiconductor-based\ntechnologies, leads to a significant reduction in the overall system weight/volume. Furthermore,\nto meet the strict requirements in terms of dynamic and steady state performance imposed by\nthe application, a novel adaptive regulator is conceived. A reduced-scale laboratory prototype of\nthe SiC-based converter (3 kVA) is realized in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed design\nand control approach.
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