Towards trajectory prediction and optimisation for energy efficiency of an aircraft with electrical and hydraulic actuation systems

As part of the CleanSky programme, this paper investigates the power consumption characteristics of standard hydraulic actuation systems against the two main power by wire alternatives; electro-hydrostatic and electromechanical actuators. Mathematical models are constructed for each technology which simulates the position response and power consumption of the actuators. The models are dynamic and designed with execution speed as a primary concern. The difficulty with aircraft primary flight control actuator simulation is obtaining input command and load force data. One solution is to record the data from flight tests but this is costly, another solution is to use a 6 degree of freedom (6-DOF) aircraft dynamics model (ADM). This technique is much more accessible and with today's high performance computers it is easily achievable; the computing power of modern desktop PC's already accommodates the concurrent simulation of a 6-DOF aircraft with high fidelity models of subsystems.