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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 phenome non is mostly due to local high pressures and reduces the service life of the syste m. 3D numerical simulations are usually used to tackle this kind of problems but ar e subjected to assumptions. As the aim of the project is to build a numerical model able t o predict pressure distribution, these assumptions need to be experimentally assessed to b e perfectly relevant of the real load distribution in the ball screw system. Due to the 3 D 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 dea ling with the second one where a demonstrator ball-screw system is manufactured in c asted epoxy to perform the SLP. This technique gives information on 3D stress field s 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.
Highlights
The THSA (Trimmable Horizontal Stabilizer Actuator) system is located at the back of aircrafts on the whole Airbus line
The contact pressure distribution is an important parameter to study for this kind of mechanical system
The numerical simulation had to be assessed by the experiment to be relevant of the pressure distribution on contacts in a ball-screw system
Summary
The THSA (Trimmable Horizontal Stabilizer Actuator) system is located at the back of aircrafts on the whole Airbus line (figure 1-a). The problem encountered on this ball-screw system is a premature spalling phenomenon on balls which reduces significantly the service life of the whole system (figure 2) This spalling of balls is induced by contact at the interface between balls and the furrow of the screw, as well as the interface between the balls and the furrow of the nut. The contact pressure distribution is an important parameter to study for this kind of mechanical system. In order to study these assumptions, this kind of mechanical problem with complex geometry and three-dimensional stress repartition can be tackled by means of 3D numerical simulation to take into account the different hypotheses. The first one was the validation of a simplified 2D numerical model of the ball screw system in light of 2D experimental data [2]. 14th International Conference on Experimental Mechanics method has been employed in order to study pressure distribution in the simplified 3D ball thrust bearing system. A comparison between both is performed to see whether the modelling can be validated in light of the experimental data
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