Design and Development of a 200-kW Turbo-Electric Distributed Propulsion Testbed

There a few NASA funded electric and hybrid electric projects from different NASA Centers, including the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) (Edwards, California). Each project identifies a specific technology gap that is currently inhibiting the growth and proliferation of relevant technologies in commercial aviation. This paper describes the design and development of a turbo-electric distributed propulsion (TeDP) hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation bench, which is a test bed for discovering turbo-electric control, distributed electric control, power management control, and integration competencies while providing risk mitigation for future turbo-electric flying demonstrators.