More electric, more safe

Advanced health-management technologies detect faults in early stages, providing an accurate health state and predicting the time-to-failures with high confidence.

Development of electrically powered flight actuation began in the 1980s with the initial control demonstration on the C-141 Electric Starlifter program. That was followed by the Electrically Powered Actuation Design (EPAD) program that flew a series of actuators on a NASA F-18. After proving the viability of the concept and the state of the art to meet performance, reliability, and safety, the U.S. AFRL and NASA have expanded their research into improving health management with investigations into prognosis with the Integrated Prognostic Health Management (IPHM) program, Aircraft Electric Power Systems Prognostics and Health Management (AEPHM) program, and the Integrated Flight Control and Actuator Health Management (IFC&AHM) program. NASA Ames' Diagnostic and Prognostics group has developed its facilities to support lab testing of actuators and control systems.

In these programs, AFRL and NASA worked with industry and academic partners to develop health-management technologies that will help prevent the occurrence of some inherent electromechanical actuator (EMA) failure modes. Advanced fault diagnostics and failure prognostics were applied to the critical failure modes identified in the Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA).