Recent Advances Towards an Integrated and Optimized Design of High Lift Actuation Systems

For actuation of high lift surfaces in modern airplanes, complex mechanical shaft transmission systems powered by central drive units are deployed. The design of mechanical actuation systems, which have a major share in the weight of secondary flight controls, is a complex and challenging engineering task. Especially for specification of essential component and system design parameters within the preliminary design phase, engineering skill and experience are of significant importance owing to many uncertainties in component data and boundary conditions. Extensive trade-offs, as well as an evaluation of the system requirements and constraints lead to an iterative and time-consuming design process. Utilizing an integrated design assistance tool, mathematical functions and constraints can be modeled on system and component level and formalized as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Thus, automated consistency checking and pruning of the solution space can be achieved. This approach can be extended to parameter optimization for arbitrary actuation configurations. The methodologies and applied modeling as well as the concept enabling optimization are presented in this paper.