The intentions of the More Electrical Aircraft (MEA) concept are weight reduction and higher efficiency. The main topic here is the application of electrical systems instead of conventional hydraulical, pneumatical and mechanical systems. Besides the substitution of conventional systems, the optimization of the electrical systems regarding power density and efficiency has become increasingly important. The state of the art electrical supply in aircrafts is a 115 V three-phase system with variable frequency from 360 to 800 Hz. New airplanes such as the B787 from Boeing or the A350 from Airbus have a 230 V three-phase supply. Conventionally, power electronic devices use autotransformer rectifier units and active front-ends to generate the DC-link voltage. An interesting alternative is the parallel active power filter (APF), which compensates for the 5th and 7th harmonics. Due to the parallel arrangement, the power density is higher compared to transformer or active front-end. Furthermore, one APF is capable of compensating for the harmonics of several devices. This paper presents the implementation of the control algorithm into two DSPs and evaluates the performance by measurement.
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