Reliability-Oriented Multi-Objective Design Optimization of Electric Aircraft Propulsion Drives

The recently emerging field of electrified aviation requires design automation which is able to quickly and accurately create light-weight, efficient, and reliable electric propulsion drives for potential mass production. This paper proposes a systematic multi-objective design methodology intended for aviation applications, specifically focusing on power electronic drives. Due to the high priority of reliability in such safety-critical applications, the lifetime estimations due to three major contributing factors are considered during the design optimization, namely, semiconductor power cycling lifetime, semiconductor cosmic radiation susceptibility, and DC-link capacitor power cycling lifetime. When used to design a back-to-back voltage source converter, the design optimization algorithm produced 114,817,329 solutions within approximately 2 hours. The resulting optimized performance with respect to power density, efficiency, and reliability was 11.66 kW/kg, 98.81%, and 223.48 Failures-in-Time (FIT), respectively.