Experimental Data Collection and Modeling for Nominal and Fault Conditions on Electro-Mechanical Actuators

Being relatively new to the field, electromechanical actuators in aerospace applications lack the knowledge base compared to ones accumulated for the other actuator types, especially when it comes to fault detection and characterization. Lack of health monitoring data from fielded systems and prohibitive costs of carrying out real flight tests push for the need of building system models and designing affordable but realistic experimental setups. This paper presents our approach to accomplish a comprehensive test environment equipped with fault injection and data collection capabilities. Efforts also include development of multiple models for EMA operations, both in nominal and fault conditions that can be used along with measurement data to generate effective diagnostic and prognostic estimates. A detailed description has been provided about how various failure modes are inserted in the test environment and corresponding data is collected to verify the physics based models under these failure modes that have been developed in parallel. A design of experiment study has been included to outline the details of experimental data collection. Furthermore, some ideas about how experimental results can be extended to real flight environments through actual flight tests and using real flight data have been presented. Finally, the roadmap leading from this effort towards developing successful prognostic algorithms for electromechanical actuators is discussed.*