Experimental study of an insert and its influence on churning losses in a high-speed electro-hydrostatic actuator pump of an aircraft

The speed of an Electro-Hydrostatic Actuator (EHA) pump can recently reach 20000 r/min, and its churning losses increase obviously with an increasing speed, which results in low efficiency and thus increasing heat in aircraft EHA systems. In order to reduce churning losses at high speeds, more attention should be given to the design of an insert. In this paper, the effect of an insert with different design parameters on churning losses is investigated through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation and experiments by calculating the difference between churning losses torques of the test pump with and without the insert based on a high-speed churning losses test rig. Analytical results show that the gap between the insert and the cylinder is critical for churning losses reduction. It is found that the churning losses of the test pump can be reduced with a decreasing gap between the cylinder block and the insert at high speeds. This is because the insert can decrease the turbulence occurrence at high speeds. The results can be used for flow field analysis and optimization of the high-speed EHA pump and provide a new method for improving efficiency of high-speed EHA pumps.     

Impact of the thermal effect on the load-carrying capacity of a slipper pair for an aviation axial-piston pump

A thermal hydraulic model based on the lumped parameter method is presented to analyze the load-carrying capacity of a slipper pair in an aviation axial-piston pump under specified operating conditions. Both theoretical and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the validity of the thermal hydraulic model. The results illustrate that the squeezing force and thermal wedge bearing force are the main factors that affect the film thickness and load-carrying capacity. At high oil temperature and high load pressure, the film thickness decreases with increasing clamping force due to a combined action of the squeezing bearing force and the thermal wedge bearing force, but the load-carrying capacity will increase. An increase of the film thickness is proven to be beneficial under high shaft rotational speed but especially dangerous as it strongly increases the ripple amplitude of the film thickness, which leads to decreasing the load-carrying capacity. The structural parameters of the slipper can be optimized to achieve desired performance, such as the slipper radius ratio and orifice length diameter ratio. To satisfy the requirement of the load-carrying capacity, the slipper radius ratio should be selected from 1.4 to 1.8, and the orifice length diameter ratio should be selected from 4 to 5.