Review of cryogenic power electronics for all-electric aircraft

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Elwakeel, Abdelrahman and Liao, Yuchuan and Xiao, Yudi and Peña Alzola, Rafael and Zhang, Min and Yuan, Weijia (2025) Review of cryogenic power electronics for all-electric aircraft. IEEE Access, 13. pp. 30646-30664. ISSN 2169-3536 (https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3539572)

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Abstract

To tackle emissions from the aviation industry and make it sustainable, research has been targeting electrifying aircraft. For this aim, articles have been focusing on how to replace regular jet engines with liquid hydrogen as fuel. This would be beneficial as hydrogen is expected to play a dual role, providing fuel for fuel cells to propel the aircraft electrically and to supply cooling to enable high-power density technologies such as superconducting machines and cryogenic power electronics circuits. However, using higher power density, especially cryogenic power electronics, can be challenging. This article investigates cryogenic power electronics for use on all-electric aircraft across different aspects, where it lays out how to integrate power electronics at cryogenic temperature into the architecture of the all-electric aircraft, how to use them with hydrogen fuel cells, and the voltage levels of the system. It reviews different semiconductor device technologies, circuit topologies, and passive devices to be used in power electronics circuitry, as well as logic circuits that are suitable for use at cryogenic temperatures. In addition, the article discusses the challenges of using semiconductor devices at such low temperatures, including the reliability, overall cooling, and recycling of hydrogen.

ORCID iDs

Elwakeel, Abdelrahman, Liao, Yuchuan, Xiao, Yudi ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5451-8014, Peña Alzola, Rafael, Zhang, Min ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4296-7730 and Yuan, Weijia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7953-4704;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)