A METHOD FOR THE EVALUATION OF ELECTROMECHANICAL ACTUATOR SYSTEMS USING EXERGY

摘要

In recent years, aircraft designers have strived to reduce aircraft fuel burn and emissions through the use of more electric aircraft (MEA). In a MEA, heavy systems such as hydraulics are replaced by an electrical system. Although a significant increase in efficiency can be achieved, many design challenges must be addressed. One issue is the high amount of coupling between electrical, mechanical, and thermal management components in a MEA. In order to account for component interactions, a system level design approach is needed. The system level approach will require the evaluation of many different types of components and architectures. In order to achieve this task, a common metric and a technique for rapidly modeling different architectures are required. A modeling environment was created for the evaluation of electromechanical actuation systems which uses exergy as a common metric. Exergy was selected for a figure of merit since it can be used universally with a variety of systems and can verify feasible designs. The modeling environment consists of several modules which are linked together to create the system model. The type and arrangement of the modules can be altered to quickly evaluate different architectures. In this study, the modeling environment is used to evaluate two EMA system architectures. One system dissipates any regenerated energy and the second system stores the regenerated energy for later use. Both cases are simulated using the modeling environment and then compared using the rate of change of exergy.