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In all-electric aircraft, electromechanical actuators (EMAs) will be used to replace hydraulic actuators. Due to the highly transient mission profiles of the aircraft operation, thermal management of EMAs is a significant issue. In this paper, we study the heat problem of the control and drive units of EMAs, and build a model to calculate and simulate the power loss and heat generation in the driver board. The driver unit consists of a power inverter, a capacitor, a power dissipating resistor and a control circuit. The power loss of each component is studied. The heat loss in the power inverter comes mainly from the power switches: IGBTs. The on-state loss is proportional to the current of the motor, and the switching loss is determined by the switching frequency as well as current.

In the aviation community, there is a high priority to develop all-electric aircraft. Electro-mechanical actuation systems would replace traditional, large, heavy and difficult-to-maintain hydraulic actuation systems. This movement from hydraulic actuation to electrical actuation enhances the flexibility to integrate redundancy and emergency system in future military aircraft. Elimination of the hydraulic fluid removes the possibility of leakage of corrosive hydraulic fluid and the associated fire hazard, as well as environmental concerns. The switch from hydraulic to electrical actuation provides additional benefits in reduced aircraft weight, improved survivability and improved maintainability. The heat load in an electro-mechanical actuation (EMA) is highly transient and localized in nature; therefore a phase change material could be embedded in the heat generating components to store peak heat load.

The development of electromechanical actuators (EMAs) is the key technology to build an all-electric aircraft. One of the greatest hurdles to replacing all hydraulic actuators on an aircraft with EMAs is the acquisition, transport and rejection of waste heat generated within the EMAs. The absence of hydraulic fluids removes an attractive and effective means of acquiring and transporting the heat. To address thermal management under limited cooling options, accurate spatial and temporal information on heat generation must be obtained and carefully monitored. In military aircraft, the heat loads of EMAs are highly transient and localized. Consequently, a FEA-based thermal model should have high spatial and temporal resolution. This requires tremendous calculation resources if a whole flight mission simulation is needed. A lumped node thermal network is therefore needed which can correctly identify the hot spot locations and can perform the calculations in a much shorter time.

This paper describes the integrated modeling of a permanent magnet (PM) motor used in an electromechanical actuator (EMA). A nonlinear, lumped-element motor electric model is detailed. The parameters, including nonlinear inductance, rotor flux linkage, and thermal resistances, and capacitances, are tuned using FEM models of a real, commercial motor. The field-oriented control (FOC) scheme and the lumped-element thermal model are also described.