Air cooling analysis and design of impacted flexible actuator’s servo controller based on PLECS

Abstract

At present, SUAV (small unmanned aerial vehicle) is developing with small shape, high dynamic performance and distributed structure. Meanwhile the power by wire, which can replace traditional hydraulic system to lighten weight and improve reliability, is important developing direction of actuator technology in future. When a plane which applies power by wire is doing high-g routine, the power devices’ loss is giant because of the high power. Thus it is necessary to design cooling structure to carry out heat from controller inner. To avoid over design and analyze more exactly, this paper introduces a method based on MATLAB and PLECS union Simulink to calculate controller’s loss. By power devices’ thermal resistance and working temperature referred from products manual, it is possible to define cooler’s size. Then we can achieve wind pressure and flow characteristic curve, and select the cooling fan. Compared with theory calculation, this method can achieve exact controller loss in different working conditions and take effects which influenced by temperature in consideration, by what we can avoid cooling structure’s over design.