An Overview of Electrically Powered Control Actuation Health Management

As More Electric Aircraft design becomes the preferred system concept for several aerospace platforms, the electro-mechanical actuator (EMA) is emerging as a solution of choice for the primary flight control actuation system. This paper will give a brief history of electric actuation for flight systems, diagnosis and prognosis demonstrations and current state of health management research. AFRL and NASA working with industry and academic partners have been developing health management technologies that will help prevent the occurrence of some inherent 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). Modeling and simulation of EMA with degraded components were developed to support the design and evaluation of physics-based algorithms. Test data were generated using EMA hardware to validate high-fidelity EMA and physics-of-failure models. The potential benefits and feasibility of advanced health management technologies were demonstrated in detecting the faults in early stages, providing an accurate health state and predicting the time-to-failures with high confidence.