Active Disturbance Rejection Control of DC-Bus Voltages within a High-Speed Aircraft Electric Starter/Generator System

Wide-speed range operation capabilities in both motoring and generation modes are essential for an aircraft electric starter-generator (ESG) drive system for more-electric aircraft applications. When running as a generator, the ESG is supplying power to a main HVDC bus within the on-board electrical system. A fast and robust DC bus voltage would be beneficial to electrical loads connected to it. In this paper, an active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is proposed to realise a fast and robust regulation of onboard dc bus voltages. The ADRC is achieved with a second-order extended state observer (ESO) to generate torque reference for the ESG. All the key characteristics, such as the stability of ESO, dc voltage tracking performance, and disturbance rejection capability of the ADRC for aircraft ESG applications are thoroughly analysed. To enhancing system stabilities, an innovative and simple design method for the ADRC and ESO gains is introduced based on the gain-margin and phase-margin criterion. Experimental results have shown that, compared with the conventional PI-based dc voltage control, the proposed method can realise a faster and more robust dc voltage control.