New Actuators for Aircraft, Space and Military Applications

Actuation is used in all vehicles (aircraft, spacecraft, ground vehicles, etc) to control the position and/or attitude of the vehicle, and also to deploy or retract equipment, particularly for embedded optic instruments (cameras, telescopes). As such, the actuation is a safety critical system, particularly when humans could be catastrophically affected by failures within the system. Applications for actuation are flight controls, landing gear, rotors, suspension, antennae steering, valves, scanning, positioning using hydraulic, electromechanical, magnetic and piezo actuators. In aircraft there is a common goal to reduce the number of hydraulic actuators in vehicles and eventually to replace them completely by electric actuators. The interest for smart suspensions is pushing magnetorheological fluids (MRF) actuators. In UAV, MAV and microsatellites, actuators key drivers are often miniaturisation and low power. Embedded optic & space instruments are leading to improved piezo actuators and motors.