Development of a redundancy and monitoring concept for an electric tail rotor drive

Future helicopter control systems are to be driven by highly redundant electric motors in order to increase the efficiency of the overall helicopter system. Due to the criticality of the functionality of the tail rotor as part of the flight control, very high safety requirements are placed on the system. Within the scope of this work, potential redundancy concepts will therefore first be developed at system level and evaluated from a safety point of view. Subsequently, simulation models of the best evaluated concepts are to be set up. These models should also represent the behaviour in the event of a fault. Finally, these system models will be used to test various monitoring and fault detection systems that have been developed in advance.

Tasks:

• Familiarisation with electric motors, safety assessment and physical modelling
• Development and evaluation of redundancy concepts for tail rotors
• Creation of physical simulation models of the electrical components and their fault cases
• Development of monitoring concepts for the detection of error cases
• Verification of the monitoring concepts with the help of the simulation models

Contact: 
For further information, please contact us by email or phone an  christoph.kupfer@tuhh.de or 040/42878-8228.