<p>In the last decades, there has been a trend in the aerospace field towards increasing the use of electrical actuation system that is usually called Power-by-Wire (PBW) actuation, pursuing the concepts of More Electric Aircraft (MEA) and All Electric Aircraft (AEA). The electrical actuation system employing PBW actuators, such as Electro-Mechanical Actuator (EMA) transports the power in "wires" between the devices&nbsp;instead of hither to used hydraulic pipeline, which remarkably improves the actuation performance of an aircraft. In EMA, the conversion from rotational to translational motion is commonly made via a few simple types of mechanism: (i) screw and nut; (ii) wheel and axle; and (iii) cam. Amon the several possibilities, the former one is the most used mechanism for aerospace applications. By&nbsp;rotating the screw, the nut moves in a line (or, vice versa, by rotating the actuator’s nut, the screw shaft moves in a line). Three&nbsp;configurations&nbsp;belong to this category: lead screw, ball screw and roller screw. However, although the&nbsp;countless inherent advantages thereof, they suffer of a critical mechanical transmission failure known as&nbsp;jamming. The jamming of the driven load is an event of high criticality in many applications such as primary flight controls or landing gears extension and steering. To avoid any hazard induced by this failure, the establishment of a predictive maintenance is indeed needed, moving further the implementation of&nbsp;structural health monitoring techniques to this application. In particular, any structural alteration which is prone to induce jamming needs to be monitored. Different possibilities are available in the way to timely&nbsp;assess the bearing of inner&nbsp;EMA&nbsp;surfaces where screwing is enabled. Within this context, this work critically reviews electromechanical&nbsp;actuators currently available for aerospace application, the&nbsp;limits for their&nbsp;upcoming deployment and the different&nbsp;solutions to achieve an on-condition maintenance to reduce any safety risk during lifetime.&nbsp;</p>

Structural Health Monitoring of Electro-Mechanical Actuators in Aviation: Recent Breakthroughs and Further Challenges

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/qnde/QNDE2021/volume/85529

ASME 2021 48th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.