Multi-phase fault tolerant drives for aircraft applications

The demand for high reliability motor drives increases every day, especially in aircraft where traditional, nonelectric systems (hydraulic, pneumatic) are being replaced by electrical actuators following the More Electric Aircraft (MEA) trend. Electric drives for aerospace need a fault-tolerant design approach to achieve reliability objectives with optimized architectures reducing redundancies, over-sizing and costs. The presented work shows how fault tolerant design methodologies can be applied in two motors for typical aircraft application such as a Cart Lift System (CLS) and a Flap Actuator (FA). Analyses and tests are reported to demonstrate how the designed multi-phase motors are able to run at rated torque also with one or two phases faulted.