University of Wisconsin – Madison USA

Impressive progress is being reported around the world on achieving major increases in the power density of electrified aircraft propulsion drive systems.  However, the reliability of today’s electric machine drives falls orders of magnitude short of the daunting reliability requirements of propulsion systems in today’s commercial wide-body aircraft.  While many agree that modularity will play a major role in achieving major drive reliability improvements, modularity is woefully inadequate to do the job alone.  The first part of this presentation will be devoted to examining the four key features required in tomorrow’s aerospace electric machine drives to make them even candidates for meeting the highly demanding flight reliability certification requirements associated with future all-electric commercial aircraft.   The second half of the presentation will address the concept of fault-tolerant modular machine drives (FT-MMDs) that is being pursued as a promising approach for achieving major improvements in the machine drive’s mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) ratings while simultaneously delivering world-class power density values.  A combination of analysis and experimental results for a FT-MMD demonstrator unit now under development will be presented to illuminate both the encouraging progress being made to achieve major reliability improvements as well as the serious remaining challenges.

Biography:

Thomas M. Jahns received his PhD and combined MS/BS degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA (USA) in 1978 and 1974, respectively.

In 1998, Dr. Jahns joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Grainger Professor of Power Electronics and Electric Machines, where he served as Co-Director/Director of the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC) for 14 years from 2007 to 2021.  Prior to joining UW, he worked at GE Corporate Research and Development (now GE Global Research Center), in Niskayuna, NY, for 15 years.  Since his retirement from the active faculty in 2021, Dr. Jahns is continuing to pursue research as a Grainger Emeritus Professor in the areas of integrated machine drives as well as high-reliability drives for safety-critical applications.

Dr. Jahns received the 2005 IEEE Nikola Tesla Technical Field Award and the IAS Outstanding Achievement Award in 2011.  He has served both the IEEE Industry Applications Society and Power Electronics Society (PELS) as a Distinguished Lecturer.  Dr. Jahns is a Past President of PELS and served two years as Division II Director on the IEEE Board of Directors (2001-2002).  He was elected as a member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2015 and received the IEEE Medal in Power Engineering in 2022.