STTR Phase I: Self-healing Power Electronics for Urban Air Mobility Applications

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to increase safety and reduce weight and redundancies for many vehicular systems and electronic devices. This project will also enhance autonomous systems integration in terms of diagnostics and enable reconfiguration for a variety of safety-critical applications. The proposed self-healing, fault-tolerant, power electronics have a large market beyond Urban Air Mobility (UAM) applications and can be implemented in a wide range of markets from transportation, to space/aerospace, biomedical devices, and microgrids. The ability of power electronics to self-diagnose faults, engage redundancy, reconfigure, and maintain operation will be fundamental in such safety-critical applications. This project will initially be applied to the safest and most sustainable Urban Air Mobility vehicles of the future offering best-in-class user experiences that can drastically improve the lives of U.S. citizens by reducing travel time with improved safety. Potential applications and use cases include on-demand air taxis, airport shuttles, personal air vehicles, last-mile delivery, air ambulance, military applications, and rescue missions. The goal of the proposed effort is to create self-healing, high-power-density, reconfigurable, and modular power electronic converters (dc/ac inverters, dc/dc converters, and ac/dc battery chargers) and architectures for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) applications. The main technical objective of this project is to improve fault tolerance in the event of battery module or motor failure in the presence of several other healthy batteries and propulsion motors. The second objective is to explore machine learning techniques in dc/ac inverter and ac/dc charger applications. The third and final objective for this project is to study the impact of the proposed self-healing modular power electronics architecture on battery state-of-charge, life, and propulsion system performance in a safety-critical UAM application. Reliability models that consider healthy and various reconfigured system architectures will be established. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.