Incremental modeling and simulation of mechanical power transmission for more electric aircraft flight control electromechanical actuation system application

In the field of more electric aircraft, electromechanical actuators (EMAs) are becoming more and more attractive because of their outstanding benefits of aircraft fuel reduction, maintenance costs saving, and system flexibility improvement. For aerospace electromechanical actuator applications, mechanical power transmission is critical for safety, in which reflected inertia to load, heat generated by energy losses and faults due to jamming, free-play and free-run are specific issues. According to the system-engineering process and simulation-aided design, this communication proposes an incremental approach for the virtual prototyping of EMA mechanical power transmission. Resorting to the Bond-graph formalism, the parasitic effects are progressively introduced and realism of models is increased step-by-step. Finally, the numerical implementations are presented and compared with basic, advanced and full models of mechanical power transmission in AMESim environment. Multi-level submodels are available and can be re-used for preliminary sizing, thermal balance verification and response to fault analysis.