While the first three episodes detailed military and avionic standards and front-end solutions, this last part 4 delves into the core of energy conversion. Part 4 will examine the critical challenge of selecting the optimal DC/DC converter topology and mode of operation, tackle magnetic circuit design, and address auxiliary functions and reliability concerns. Finally, this story will outline a comprehensive modular power architecture, built from the functions previously discussed and realized through specific COTS modules. PCB layout considerations will also be discussed.

Following our exploration of military standards and practical transient suppression, we now turn to
a common challenge in switch-mode power supply (SMPS) design: containing conducted noise. In
this article we will explore conducted noise paths and filtering techniques. Traditionally, managing
bus interruptions has relied on large bulk capacitors to maintain energy on the primary side. In this
third part of the series, we examine how GAIA-converter’s approach—embedding a boost converter
within a board-mounted module—reduces the required capacitor value for a given hold-up time.

After outlining the key standards for military and avionics power supply design in part 1, this part
2 turns to one of their most demanding challenges: managing input bus electrical overstress.
The wide bus voltage range, transients, spikes, and undervoltage conditions all present a strict
set of constraints for the power electronics designer. This part 2 of the story breaks down, how
overvoltages are characterized in these standards and provides engineers with practical methods to
suppress them. It looks at spikes and surges and explains, how a transient limiter works.

While power electronics designers are skilled at designing power supplies, they often lack the
knowledge necessary to meet military or aerospace standards. This series of four articles provides
guidance to help designers understand standard parameters and presents best practices for
the effective design of aerospace and military-grade power supplies.

Increasingly, military vehicles are provisioned with electronics for control, communications, navigation and display systems. DC-DC converters provide auxiliary power for these systems but can be subject to high electrical and environmental stress in the application. This article outlines the stress levels defined by the common standards used and identifies the specifications that DC-DC converters need to meet.

Electric Vertical Take-Off and Land (eVTOL) aircraft for freight and passenger use are a natural progression from the drone technology that is now commonplace. However, reliability in these new applications is a prime consideration and core to this is maintenance of power to flight control and navigation electronics under fault conditions. In this article we look at some auxiliary DC power supply architectures, their characteristics and practical implementations for high reliability and availability.

Electric Vertical Take-Off and Land (eVTOL) vehicles are set to proliferate in the coming few years. As in other aerospace applications, safety is paramount, normally requiring multiple layers of hardware redundancy. eVTOL craft however must be as lightweight as possible, so a trade-off has to be made between acceptable reliability and hardware complexity. This e-guide considers the situation, particularly with regards to power conversion electronics.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a compact and high-frequency LLC converter with wide input voltage range (from 220 V to 320 V), output power range (from 250 W to 1.5 kW), high efficiency (over 96 % at full power), high power-density (32 kW/dm 3 ) and narrow frequency variations (15 %)…

Aircraft applications are in continuous need to reduce equipment volume to optimize fuel and weight. Power converters are an essential part of this volume since electric distribution has either AC and DC buses…