Reliable and lightweight primary flight control actuation using magneto-rheological clutches in slippage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Replacing aircraft hydraulic actuators with ElectroMechanical Actuators (EMAs) is seen as a necessary step towards the development of safer and more efficient aircraft with minimal environmental impact. EMAs are commonly used in a wide range of applications as they have improved efficiency over hydraulic actuators. However, in their current form, EMAs do not comply with the stringent weight and reliability requirements of primary flight control applications. This paper describes an Active Torque Distribution (ATD) system that could meet flight control reliability requirements, be lightweight, and increase the dynamic performance of current flight controls. The proposed ATD system uses magneto-rheological clutches to modulate the torque transferred from a centralized velocity source to various control surfaces. The fundamental advantage of this approach is found in the fluidic nature of magneto-rheological clutch interfaces which transmit torque without any solid mechanical contact thus preventing wear and failure causing mechanical seizure. The analytical study used to scale an ATD system and an analogue EMA system based on a representative flight control application shows that the proposed ATD system is 42% lighter than a system composed of EMAs and has a weight similar to that of current hydraulic actuators. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that ATD systems add ~100x less inertia to flight surfaces than EMAs allowing implementation of load alleviation control algorithms requiring high frequency motion (~30 Hz). A proof-of-concept clutch and controller confirm the analytical predictions and validate the possibility of using magneto-rheological clutches for flight control actuation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".