Design and Testing of a Cooling Fan for Electro-Mechanical Actuators for Aerospace Applications

Abstract

Air cooling with wing bay air circulated by axial flow fans is the most suitable and viable way in cooling aircraft Electro-mechanical Actuators (EMAs) used for flight control surfaces. The main objective of the cooling fan is to deliver high static pressure head and high volumetric flow rate overall operating ambient conditions (ambient pressure from 0.2 to 1 atm). In this paper, a preliminary axial flow fan design is first established with the size restriction to fit in the wing bay (diameter of fan is 86 mm). This design is then optimized by conducting a parametric CFD simulation to study the effect of changing the fan blade cord length and blade setting angle. The optimized design is 3D printed and mounted on the motor of a commercially available fan made by Sunon. Both the designed and Sunon fans are tested in a fan loop that has been designed and constructed following the ISO standards. The volume flow rate and the static pressure head are measured at different ambient pressures