Optimization of Electrical Energy Storage System Sizing for an Accurate Energy Management in an Aircraft

The development of More Electrical Aircraft has lead to the adaptation of their electrical architecture and their capacity of power generation and storage. Therefore, generation and storage systems must be well sized to match their energetic performances versus the vehicle requirements. This paper deals with the optimal sizing of storage systems (secondary batteries and supercapacitors) for an aircraft. In this particular application, the global weight of the whole storage system must be minimized. An optimal sizing tool has been developed to reach this objective by acting on setting parameters that are the cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter (to share out the mission profile between storage systems according to an energy management based on a frequency approach), the discharge ratio for storage components (in relation with their technological limits and the electrical network specifications), and temperature (which can be seen as an environmental constraint as well). The optimization results, which are obtained with the simulated annealing method implemented in MATLAB, are presented and assessed throughout the whole temperature range. Finally, the impact of setting parameters on the global storage system weight is studied, and an adaptation of the energy management strategy is presented to take into account the temperature influence on battery performances.