PROCESS FOR VIRTUAL DESIGN AND TESTING OF FLIGHT CONTROL ACTUATION SYSTEMS

Abstract

Despite increasing product complexity, aviation industry demands shorter development cycles. This challenge requires cross-disciplinary collaboration and continuous support through a virtual design and testing process. In this context, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is establishing the multi-disciplinary platform Virtual Product House (VPH). The aim of VPH is to cover the entire development process up to virtual certification and to enable a strong collaboration between the classical disciplines flight physics, structures, and systems. This paper presents an integrated virtual design and testing process at actuation system level. The process consists of four main activities: preliminary design, detailed design, high fidelity analyses, and simulation-based testing. The focus is on the process flow and the required analysis steps in order to realize a continuous virtual system development. A particular challenge is the lack of information with respect to the components’ behavior since the vision is to perform a pure virtual system verification before any hardware is built. The approach is illustrated using an electromechanical actuator (EMA) for flight control.