Development of an aeronautical electromechanical actuator with real time health monitoring capability

Abstract

Development and implementation of EMAs has increased rapidly during the last years in the context of the “more electrical aircraft”. One of the main technical key issues for the EMA implementation is the jamming. It can appear due to metalmetal contact of load transmission (in gearboxes, bearings and ball/roller screws). This problem penalizes the reliability although with very low failure rate. To overcome this problem in aeronautical EMAs are actually several ways investigated, where one of the most attractive and with more promising is the implementation of advanced monitoring systems. This implementation of “smart” monitoring systems will imply a clear economical profit in the final product and in the complete system: envisaged benefits will be lower maintenance costs with higher reliability, instead of increasing maintenance costs and decreasing reliability for classical components without Health Monitoring. At the end, the selection of the Health Monitoring and Management system will be able to establish different levels of validation: failure detection, diagnostic and prognostic; this will provide a proactive maintenance strategy in order to replace EMA before failure. A demonstrator prototype of an innovative electromechanical actuator with real time health monitoring capability has been designed and developed by SENER. This actuator type can be taken as a reference for typical secondary control surface applications. This development is based on previous work performed by SENER in AWIATOR project where one of the tasks was the design and calculation of the new flap trailing edge with MINITEDs. In addition, this work included the supports and linkages of the current actuator to the MINITED. This compact electromechanical actuator shows innovations with respect to current state-of-the-art electrical actuators as lightness and compactness of the resulting actuator, with high power density within small dimensions. As an added value, an additional plug module is under development for real time health monitoring to detect potential working incidents: “smart actuator”. One of the additional key points will be the health management in order to solve the introduction of these systems in EMAs, and to check the compatibility with the aircraft systems.