All-electric Actuation − Transition from Aircraft to Marine Systems

Recent developments in brushless dc motors and their drives have provided the technology to build electromechanically actuated primary controls. As a result, they have been proposed for ground, aerospace and (recently) marine applications. In this paper, previous architectures in an all-electric aircraft actuation control surface system will be proposed for an all-electric marine system. To overcome some of the possible drawbacks associated with these architectures, and to focus future efforts on reliability and efficiency improvements, the paper proposes a Shaft Spread Electromagnetic Torque Summing technique as an alternative. A previously proposed Fault detection and Fault Isolation system (implementing Monitoring Voting Averaging Devices, MVADs) will also be recommended. Possible threshold setting techniques on the MVADs and the likely influence threshold values have on the overall system performance (with or without failures) will also be described.