More electric aircraft (MEA) is an important direction for future aircraft development. The printed circuit boards (PCBs) of power electronics equipment in MEA operate in a complex environment of low air pressure, square wave voltage, compact layout, and strong electromagnetic interference, which makes the PCB more prone to partial discharge (PD). However, the effective detection method and related discharge characteristics for PCB PD under square wave voltage are still unclear. Therefore, this article proposes a PCB PD detection method based on fluorescent optical fiber, which has good anti-electromagnetic interference ability. The PD characteristics of the PCB with three typical structures under three air pressures are studied, including PD nonbreakdown characteristics, changes in optical pulse amplitude and pulse repetition rate during PD aging, PD breakdown path analysis, and PCB surface electric field simulation. The analysis shows that air pressure, space charge, and PCB surface flatness all have important influences on the PD of PCB under square wave voltage. It provides important theoretical support for the insulation protection design and fault diagnosis of PCB for MEA in the future.

More and more printed circuit boards (PCBs) will be used in electric aircraft to achieve higher power density of the on-board electric system, while PCBs in aircraft are more likely to generate partial discharges (PDs) due to external factors such as compact structure and low air pressure. Therefore, this article proposes a fluorescent fiber-based method for detecting and evaluating PDs on PCBs. The detection method is effectively immune against the presence of the electromagnetic, acoustic, and vibration interference. Based on the optical detection, the evolution regularities of PCB surface appearance changes, optical PRPD patterns, and optical pulses during the aging process of PCB under different air pressure are analyzed in this article. Then, 12 assessment features are extracted for the PD aging process, and the contribution of these 12 features to the severity assessment at different air pressures is obtained using the minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance (mRMR) algorithm. Finally, different numbers of PD features are tested for PD severity assessment by the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. The evaluation results show that the severity assessment method proposed in this article can achieve an assessment accuracy of at least 91.1% and up to 94.4% under all three air pressures, which has good application and guidance value.

With the widespread application of power electronic switching technology, power equipment is facing new electrical stresses brought about by multilevel staircase voltages during testing and operation. Therefore, the partial discharge (PD) behavior of five typical defects in power equipment under the staircase waveform needs to be investigated. This article mainly analyses the phase-resolved PD (PRPD) pattern and pulse repetition rate (PRR) of five typical defects under sinusoidal voltage and multilevel staircase voltage with different number of levels. Also, the PD behavior under staircase voltage with different step responses are investigated. By analyzing the reasons behind the PD behavior between different cases, the PD characteristics and the transformation of PRPD patterns under different staircase voltages are obtained. Moreover, this research finds that the sensitivity of different defects to the staircase voltage is different. These results provide experimental and theoretical support for the testing and diagnosis of PD under new electrical stress present in the future flexible electric grid.

Realization of an electrical aircraft demands a low-weight electric distribution and propulsion system. The use of high voltage and power electronics operated at high switching frequencies is essential to achieve this objective. However, printed circuit boards (PCBs) in electrified aircraft are in a harsh working environment, which can make PCBs more susceptible to generate partial discharges (PDs). The current PD detection technology has poor immunity to the electromagnetic interference and acoustic interference in the operating environment of aircraft. Therefore, this article proposes an optical-based PD detection method for PCBs, which is effectively immune to electromagnetic and acoustic interference. This method uses fluorescent fiber as a PD optical signal sensor and then collects the optical signal by the avalanche photodiode (APD). Experiments have verified that the detection sensitivity, sensing range, and anti-interference performance of this method are well satisfied with the PD detection. In addition, single PD pulse, optical phase resolved PD (PRPD) patterns, and PD inception voltage (PDIV) under different air pressure and voltage conditions are investigated. Finally, the relationship between the optical signal and PD amplitude is found to be proportional, which proves that the severity of the PD on PCBs can be effectively detected and evaluated by this method.

Optical partial discharge (PD) detection is an efficient means of diagnosing the insulation status of power equipment. C4F7N/CO2 gas mixture is a very potential environmentally-friendly SF6 substitute gas, and its PD optical characteristics need to be studied to guide the PD diagnosis of novel C4F7N/CO2 equipment. Therefore, this article proposes a multispectral microarray detection technology, which can achieve high-sensitivity detection and PD diagnosis by simultaneously collecting the spectral characteristics of multiple bands. By setting up an experimental platform, the PD experiments of four typical defects in the C4F7N/CO2 gas mixture with five different proportions and pure SF6 are carried out. Based on the analysis of PD multispectral features, the correlation between different gases and the difference between different defects are obtained. Finally, by combining multispectral detection with a t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (T-SNE) feature extraction algorithm, a PD diagnosis method that can adapt to both C4F7N/CO2 gas mixture and SF6 is proposed, which provides a reference for the PD detection of novel C4F7N/CO2 equipment application.