Health Monitoring for the Flight Control EMAs

In the frame of the more electrical aircraft context initiated by Airbus A380, A400M and A350 programs, the Electro-Mechanical Actuators (EMA) are good candidates for electrical flight control actuation. In this scope, this paper presents the current status and the perspectives of the Health Monitoring (HM) function developed for the flight control system EMA technologies. It highlights the main technical challenges to face: jamming susceptibility, “on board” maintenance reduction, operational reliability and safety margin increase. Thanks to dedicated R&T activities about the EMA Health Monitoring, the current results are very promising at this stage and have enabled demonstration of TRL4 at the Aircraft system level according to the maturity readiness level process. In the coming years, the activities will be conducted up to flight test campaign demonstration.