In November 18, 2021, the master student Rodrigo Simões Lopes Junior presented his master thesis by video call. The thesis title is “Performance evaluation of a digital hydraulic actuator for aeronautical purpose under failure condition.”. The main goal of the thesis was to evaluate the effects of different failures on the dynamic behavior of a Digital Hydraulic Actuator – DHA, with a focus on understanding the degradation in the controllability, actuator performance, and aircraft attitude. In this work, the results of several analyzes carried out with the DHA conception were presented, and allowed a greater compression of the DHA behavior under failure conditions, in order to understand the minimum redundancy requirements that allow the system’s operability for different failures cases. The study involved experimental analyzes and mathematical models developed in Matlab / Simulink® and Hopsan® of the studied actuators. In a later step, the actuator models were resized to be competent in the elevons of the delta-canard combat aircraft model “AeroData Model in a Research Environment – ADMIRE”, developed by SAAB AB in partnership with the “Swedish Defense Research Agency – FOI”. Finally, this dissertation adds to the set of works developed by the Brazil-Sweden partnership involving LASHIP-UFSC, FLUMES-LIU, CERTI and SAAB AB, which has been presenting promising results in digital hydraulic actuator solutions for aerospace purposes, receiving international recognition as a reference in this theme.
