Modeling Superconducting Components of the Electric Aircraft

Electrification of the mobility sector is at the center of attention to reduce $\text{CO}_{2}$ emissions and mitigate man-made climate change. At present, commercial air travel is responsible for around 2.4% of the annual global carbon emissions. This is a motivation behind developing fully-electric, zero-emission aircraft. The advantages of superconductivity, including compactness, low weight, and high efficiency, make this technology a promising choice to accelerate the transition to electric aircraft. An electric aircraft's powertrain might include motors, converters, DC and AC cables, batteries, fuel cells, fault current limiters, power generators, and fuel storage. The higher the total power of the electric aircraft, the more interesting it is to use superconducting devices. This work models the overall electric powertrain with MATLAB/SIMULINK. One component is a resistive superconducting fault current limiter which is modeled via an electrical-thermal lumped-parameter method in MATLAB. Moreover, the electrical-thermal lumped-parameter, one-dimensional, and two-dimensional modeling of superconducting DC cables is developed using MATLAB programming and compared. In addition, the configurable MATLAB SIMULINK models of these components can be integrated in other electric systems.