Supercapacitor stability and control for More Electric Aircraft application

This paper deals with the stability analysis and the control of a supercapacitor in the framework of the More Electric Aircraft (MEA). The objective is to reduce the stress on the mechanical part of the aeronautic power generator caused by the typical piece-wise constant current profile of the Electro-Mechanical Actuators (EMAs) onboard the aircraft. Stability properties of the open-loop system are proven through a rigorous theoretical analysis aimed at demonstrating the stability uniformly with any arbitrarily chosen switching signal. The control strategy considered is a Second Order Sliding Mode, able to guarantee monotonic convergence of the sliding variable to the origin. Detailed simulations have been provided in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.