Wright Electric, a company developing an electric single aisle commerical aircraft comparable to the Boeing 737 or Airbus 320 ( earlier post ), has begun testing and has demonstrated a megawatt-class high-performance inverter. Whether a future airplane is battery-electric or powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, an inverter is a key component in high-voltage aircraft electric systems. Designed to be scalable from 500 kw to 20 MW systems, the Wright inverter targets the following levels of performance: 99.5% efficiency – a 6x improvement in heat loss over current in-production aviation inverters resulting in significantly lower thermal management loads. 30 kw/kg power density – in contrast, today’s technology delivers 10-20 kw/kg. On a standard single-aisle aircraft, this would result in a weight savings equivalent to adding an extra 5-10 passengers per flight. Wright’s inverters are designed for a high-frequency drive. The Wright inverter has a 300 kHz high-frequency output, compared […]