Health Monitoring of Electro-Mechanical Actuators for primary flight surfaces

This thesis has been developed under the funded project named REPRISE (Reliable Electromechanical actuator for PRImary SurfacE with health monitoring), which aims to design a novel Electro-Mechanical Actuator (EMA) to be used on primary flight surfaces of small aircrafts. The main feature of the enhanced system is a novel embedded Health Monitoring (HM) component, which aims at assessing the grade of deterioration of the specimen without resorting to additional sensing within the EMA, but by monitoring the indirect effects that the operating degradation of the mechanical transmission elements has on measurements not directly related to their status. The entire work has been validated experimentally by the employment of a dedicated test bench to perform endurance tests, gradually leading the mechanical components to final failure. The deterioration has been evaluated also by visual inspection and screw thread profile measurements. The effectiveness of the CD algorithm has been proven despite there was no evidence of loss of ability in pursuing the EMA main function of position tracking. This work delivers an important contribution to the More Electric Aircraft mission and lies the foundation for the development of an HM module able to estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the specimen and thus allowing maintenance actions when the an upcoming failure is advised, in a Predictive Maintenance strategy.