Study of Different Architectures of Fault-Tolerant Actuator Using a Two-Channel PM Motor

In the context of more electric aircraft, the use of electric actuators instead of hydraulic ones is one of the main topics of research and development in electrical engineering. A high level of reliability, the redundancy, and the compactness are required for aircraft electrical actuators. For achieving these purposes, a classical solution consists in using two identical actuators motorized by one permanent magnet (PM) motor supplied by a voltage source inverter (VSI). In this paper, a solution based on the use of only one fault-tolerant actuator performed by a two-star connected-winding (two-channel) PM motor supplied by two pulsewidth modulated VSIs is proposed. The design of the PM motor can be achieved in two different ways, which are proposed and studied in this paper. The authors focus this paper on the comparison between the two winding architectures and compare the two motors in terms of the short-circuit current and magnetic decoupling of the two windings. Both simulation and experimental results are given and discussed.