EE331 Design Project Proposal

for Dr. Khan A. Wahid

Prepared by
Jason Pannell and Olivier Larocque

Proposal: A PIC16F877 Controlled Generator Control Unit

The B212 is a rotary aircraft developed by Bell Helicopter Textron in the 1970s. This helicopter is powered by Pratt & Whitney twin-pac turbine powerplant. The power generation comes from the generators which supply power to two independent 'essential busses'. Generator Control Units (GCU)independently control the operation of the Generators. The GCUs have many functions such as Voltage Regulation, Ground Fault Protection, Under/Over Voltage, and Reversed Current. When an under or over Voltage condition occurs, the GCU adjusts the Voltage Regulator to control the Starter/Generator output voltage. Similarly, the Ground Fault protection feature uses current sense transformers to detect ground faults and using relays will remove the power generated to the DC essential bus, and the pilots will get a warning light on the Master Caution Panel indicating that the Generator is offline. Our proposal is to build an under/over voltage protector which emulates some of the functions of the GCU in the helicopter. Our project would use the PIC to monitor several voltages (+28V, +12V, +5V), by multiplexing the analog to digital convertor in the PIC. We would monitor the voltages for over voltage and under voltage conditions and take appropriate actions when these conditions occurred. This would involve shutting down that voltage bank and alerting the user to the fault condition. We would also use the output of a ground fault monitor to respond to a ground fault situation. We would have this set up as an external interrupt on the PIC, so when a ground fault is recognized the PIC will immediately respond and shut down the system as necessary to prevent damage. An indicator would be used to inform the operator of the type of problem. We would use the PIC16F877 to accomplish this project. This microcontroller has enough I/O pins for our needs. The analog to digital convertor section has 8 channels which would allow us to monitor multiple voltages. The 16F877 also has external interrupts which we want to use for the ground fault monitor. Some of the challenges in the design will be designing a system to monitor the different voltages, and figuring out the thresholds for over/under voltages and responding to this all within the PIC. We will also have to respond to an external interrupt at any time. The group will include two members, Olivier Larocque and Jason Pannell. We plan to divide the project as evenly as possible, with each of us participating in every step. We do not want to each build a block of the project and then try to fit it together after. Our proposed timeline is shown below.

Oct 15 - Project Specifications Finalized Oct 21 - Preliminary Flowchart and Schematic completed Nov 1 - Circuit Prototyped, Basic code functioning(I/O working, A-D functional) Nov 15 - Code fully functional, only tweaking/improvements left Nov 21 - Project completed