Preliminary design of electromechanical actuators with Modelica Marc Budinger (*), Jonathan Liscouet (*) Yvan Lefevre(**), Julien Fontchastagner(**) and Abde- nour Abdelli(**) Loig Allain(***) Université de Toulouse, IN- SA/UPS, Laboratoire de Génie Mécanique de Toulouse Toulouse, 31077, France Université de Toulouse, INPT/CNRS, Laboratoire Plasma et Conversion d’Energie, Tou- louse, 31071, France LMS-Imagine La Cité Internationnale 84 quai Charles de Gaulle 69006 LYON marc.budinger@insa- toulouse.fr Yvan.Lefevre@laplace.univ- tlse.fr loig.allain@lmsintl.com Abstract This article deals with a methodology for a comput- er-aided design of electromechanical actuators from the preliminary design of components to the detail design of the electrical motor. The developed library of components for the simulation takes advantage of the non-causal and object oriented characteristics of the Modelica language. The capabilities of the Mod- elica language and the LMS.Imagine.Lab AMESim or Dymola Platforms are strongly used in order to build a fully integrated process to design and size the different component of the final actuator. The pro- posed approach is illustrated with the sizing of a flight control actuator. Keywords: preliminary design, inverse simulation, scaling laws, electromechanical actuator, brushless motor 1 Introduction Thanks to the development of powers electronics and permanent magnets, electromechanical actuators are very promising with respect to, e.g. automatic oper- ating mode, power management, reliability, maintai- nability. For this reason, it can be very interesting to replace current actuators based on another technolo- gy less promising in these fields (e.g. hydraulic) with electromechanical actuators. A good illustration of this tendency is the research effort towards the “more electric aircraft” in aeronautics [1]. An electrome- chanical actuation system is very complex to design and to optimize, especially because of its multidis- ciplinary characteristic [2]. This paper presents a new methodology to help the engineer from the pre- liminary to the detailed design of electromechanical actuators. Modelica coded libraries used here are especially to encompass 2 steps in the V design cycle (Figure 1) : • The power sizing (part 2) which aims at siz- ing and specify the various components of the operating system in order to meet the specification requirements (on nominal points or on mission profile) in terms of ef- fort and speed (and therefore power). • The detailed design of components (part 4), brushless motor here, which allows the de- signers to obtain fine sizing of components in order to enable the fabrication and more accurate simulations.                        Figure 1: V design cycle The libraries presented in this paper are illustrated in part 3 and 5 by the design a flight control actuator (see Figure 2) from global specifications to the fine sizing of the brushless motor. Proceedings 7th Modelica Conference, Como, Italy, Sep. 20-22, 2009 © The Modelica Association, 2009 168 DOI: 10.3384/ecp09430099