Prognostics of on-board electromechanical actuators: Bio-Inspired Metaheuristic Algorithms

The aerospace sector is increasingly looking to the advent of the more electrical philosophy, but from a practical point of view the technologies available are neither sufficient nor suitable for aeronautical use, especially for primary flight controls, for which the levels of safety and reliability required are very high. For this reason, great care is needed in fault management, not only through redundancies, which are not always feasible on an aircraft for weight reasons, but also through suitably designed diagnostic and prognostic software. Given the importance that these problems have assumed today, it was therefore considered important to try to develop algorithms capable of detecting faults before they can irreversibly compromise the aircraft. In particular, the choice of the field of application of these algorithms (inspired by various biological species) fell on an electromechanical actuator, aimed at the implementation of primary flight commands. The actuator and its failure modes were modelled in Matlab Simulink. After studying the dynamic response of the system and reporting the results, several algorithms were implemented in order to use them for prognostic purposes.heuristic Bio-Inspired Algorithms for Prognostics of On-Board Electromechanical Actuators