Experimental validation of a numerical simulation on a ballscrew system by 3D photoelasticity

Abstract

The Trimmable Horizontal Stabilizer Actuator (THSA system) equips the whole airbus line. One component of this system is a ball-screw system on which spalling problems appear on the balls. This phenomenon is mostly due to local high pressures and reduces the service life of the system. 3D numerical simulations are usually used to tackle this kind of problems but are subjected to assumptions. As the aim of the project is to build a numerical model able to predict pressure distribution, these assumptions need to be experimentally assessed to be perfectly relevant of the real load distribution in the ball screw system. Due to the 3D geometry of the specimen, a 3D measurement technique, Scattered Light Photoelasticity (SLP), has been chosen to perform experimental measurements,. Because of complexity of the geometry, the study is divided in three steps; the present paper is dealing with the second one where a demonstrator ball-screw system is manufactured in casted epoxy to perform the SLP. This technique gives information on 3D stress fields inside the epoxy specimen from the analysis of photoelastic fringes. They are compared to numerical ones and indicate whether numerical boundary conditions are relevant of the experimental ball-screw system behaviour.