Novel voltage and current sensors for future aircraft
Highly accurate current and voltage measurement is essential to optimising on-board electrical networks that have increasing power consumption and complexity. The avionics industry uses current and voltage sensors that are shunt or resistive divider devices, Hall-effect devices or transformers. However, the weak point of these traditional magnetic sensors is remanence, which generates offset drift. Researchers within the NEELEFFECTINTHESKY (Magnetic sensors with no remanence for aircraft application) project leveraged an innovative magnetic nanotechnology developed by a France-based company. Sensor technology has its foundations in fundamental physics and is based on the use of a nano-structured, superparamagnetic composite with unique magnetic and mechanical properties. This flexible material made up from particles whose size is less than 10 nm completely eliminates magnetic remanence. With high accuracy on both weak and strong currents, this sensor technology can measure both AC and DC currents, even in hostile environments that involve vibrations, high temperatures or electromagnetic disturbances. Project members focused on validating this technology for avionic sensors and then develop five prototype current sensors and five voltage sensors. With power increases on board, networks manage currents with very high intensities and voltages. Sensors not only protect equipment and personnel against fault currents, they also ensure simultaneous accurate energy measuring in restrictive electromagnetic environments and at extreme temperatures. The team worked on designing versatile sensors that could accurately work both in cold zones (ambient temperatures less than – 60 °C) and hot zones (ambient temperatures greater than 115 °C). The targeted total power consumption for the closed-loop current sensors was less than 1 W. These sensors were also planned to be immune to electrical noise. In addition, researchers investigated the possibility of using the same electronic circuit for the voltage and current sensors. Versatility, reduced size and lower weight of sensor prototypes enables them to be integrated into a compact application-specific integrated circuit, reducing the weight of next-generation aircraft.
Keywords
Voltage, current sensors, aircraft, magnetic sensors, remanence, NEELEFFECTINTHESKY
