Mechanical and thermal management design of a motor for an aircraft wheel actuator

A permanent magnet motor is designed as an actuator for taxiing large aircraft in an airport. The motor is attached to the main aircraft wheel to provide a direct drive. A special topology for this machine is developed selected and designed. Due to a high torque of this machine and requirement for low mass, thermal management of the machine is one of the main challenges. The machine is air cooled with an optimized the fin array to cool the machine. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is applied to get detailed thermal performance of the machine at the design stage to improve the cooling of machine. Initial thermal tests are done and the results used to validate the motor design are predicted for the whole duty cycle of the aircraft taxiing operation using CFD and Finite Element Analysis (FEA).