Special Considerations to Thermal Behavior Modeling and Simulation of an Aerospace Electromechanical Actuation System

For the next generation of “more electric or all electric aircraft”, there is a significant interest in using electromechanical actuators (EMAs) for flight controls, thrust reverse and landing gears, and therefore remove the centralized hydraulic circuits. To achieve this goal, new challenges for safety-critical actuations must be faced and several key issues must be considered in the early phases of the design process, such as jamming, thermal behavior, dynamics, etc. This communication deals with the analysis of EMA thermal behavior. The Bond-graph formalism is used to support the EMA thermal model architecting. On the basis of model based system engineering (MBSE), the effort is in architecting the models of energy losses to make them “ready for” extensive system-level simulation. Because of the multi-domain coupling, the EMA topology is decomposed into generic components and bodies, ensuring mechanically and energy balances. A simple and an advanced thermal models’ architecture are developed to help analyzing the performance characteristics of the heat transfer in EMA. The models are causal and can be implemented in today’s commercial simulation software to assess the EMA energy consumption and heat transfer.