Electrical Power Conditioning Unit And System - ESA

ESA / Enabling & Support / Space Engineering & Technology

559 - Abstract:

The European Space Agency (ESA) has developed an electrical Power Conditioning Unit (PCU) and system. The main function of a PCU is to condition the energy coming from the power sources (typically solar arrays and batteries) and to deliver it continuously to the users in an appropriate form during the overall mission. The offered PCU unit and system provide reduced complexity, greater flexibility, increased efficiency and/or reduced mass compared to common architectures. Partners for industrialization are sought.

Description of the offer:

The offer relates to a an electrical Power Conditioning Unit (PCU) and system, in particular for a regulated solar bus. This concept can be implemented in a power conditioning unit in order to extract the power from the solar arrays with Maximum Power Point Tracker, to manage the charge of the battery and to generate one or several regulated buses that can be used either internally to the PCU to supply its control circuitry or external unit via a centralised regulated bus.

Thanks to these topologies, a single converter is optimized, reducing the number of components used, simplifying the control circuitry and providing better performances.

Innovations and advantages

• The offered technology aims at providing an improved PCU architecture with reduced complexity, greater flexibility, increased efficiency and/or reduced mass.

• Furthermore, it allows minimizing the losses, and in particular the conduction losses by using a single converter based on a single reactive structure. This leads to the very high efficiency values, as it has been experimentally verified in well documented laboratory studies.

Commercialisation aspects:

Applications and Markets

The PCU and system architecture of the offered technology can also be used in terrestrial applications where there is need for an improved PCU for short charge-discharge periods.

A particular field of expertise that could be interested in this technology would be on energy generating devices, namely on solar or wind energy, where several energy sources have to managed according to the availability of the original source of power.

Intellectual property status

Currently patented (France, Germany and USA) and looking for license agreements.

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