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There are many identical large solid-state switching Multi-Purpose Motor Controllers on board of one of the More Electric Aircrafts (MEA). The controllers drive over twice as many different machines with wide torque and speed ranges. The common motor controllers are installed in a central location. The machines are located at diverse and distant positions. Power is delivered and routed from the controllers to machines via a large network comprising of unshielded feeders and multiplexing units. The controllers are required to produce sine wave voltage output to machines, and draw clean power from the source to meet Power Quality (PQ) and Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) requirements. There are significant aircraft level weight savings with that concept. However, designing such a clean motor controller was a major power density challenge beyond switches, accounting for high torque main propulsion engine start and high speed Cabin Air Compressors.

In 3-phase AC application, there is additional heat dissipation due to skin effects and proximity effects in bus bars. In addition, when the 3- phase AC is used to drive a motor at high fundamental frequency, for example between 666 Hz and 1450 Hz, there are higher bus bar losses due to presence of higher frequency harmonic content. High frequency current carrying bus bars in aircraft power panels are typically cooled by natural convection and radiation. In this paper a thermal and electrical finite element analysis (FEA) is done for a bus bar system. For electrical loss modeling, 3D electromagnetic FEA is used to characterize losses in three parallel bus bars carrying AC at various frequencies. This loss analysis provides correlation of heat loss as function of frequency. A method is presented where this AC loss is incorporated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based thermal model. Material resistivity is artificially adjusted to account for skin and proximity effects.