Mechanical and thermal management design of a motor for an aircraft wheel actuator

Xu, Z.; Galea, M.; Tighe, C.; Hamiti, T.; Gerada, C.; Pickering, S.J.

Abstract

A permanent magnet motor is designed as an actuator for taxiing large aircraft in an airport. The motor is attached to the main aircraft wheel to provide a direct drive. A special topology for this machine is developed selected and designed. Due to a high torque of this machine and requirement for low mass, thermal management of the machine is one of the main challenges. The machine is air cooled with an optimized the fin array to cool the machine. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is applied to get detailed thermal performance of the machine at the design stage to improve the cooling of machine. Initial thermal tests are done and the results used to validate the motor design are predicted for the whole duty cycle of the aircraft taxiing operation using CFD and Finite Element Analysis (FEA).

• Conference Name: 2014 17th International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)
• Conference Location: Hangzhou, China
• Start Date: Oct 22, 2014
• End Date: Oct 25, 2014
• Acceptance Date: Jun 4, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Oct 22, 2014
• Publication Date: Jan 19, 2015
• Deposit Date: Aug 24, 2018
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Book Title: 2014 17th International Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems (ICEMS)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEMS.2014.7014056
• Public URL: http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84922764899&partnerID=40&md5=a2b0c09f6e70141660b3193a2b4203a3