Title: Investigation of Governing Laws for Scaling MVDC Breakerless Architectures in S3D
Authors: R. Soman, T. Toshon, I. Leonard, O. Faruque and M. Steurer
Abstract: Medium voltage direct current (MVDC) systems are attractive for development of next generation US Navy all electric ships. The Smart Ship Systems Design (S3D) is an emerging tool to enable the Navy to address early stage design queries [1] incorporating multi-disciplinary concurrent engineering approaches. An important S3D study is to assess benefits of breakerless high fault current free MVDC architectures (Figure 1). Owing to the notional nature of such distribution systems, the physical attributes of equipment utilized remains relatively unknown, making simulation studies at various combinations of power/voltage/current ratings inexact. To address this, on-going and future work at CAPS aims to investigate scaling laws and related governing parameters that provide verifiable physical properties data, for instance as done with the fast DC disconnect switch [2] and [3]. Such scaling laws are expected to play a vital role in establishing comparative efficiency and feasibility assessments between the MVDC breakerless and other competing architectures for next generation warships. This paper proposes a methodology to enable better informed future feasibility studies through S3D simulations of MVDC breakerless architectures with respect to vital physical properties like weight and volume related to power ratings of equipment and expands on the thorough assessment conducted in [4].