Design of linear thruster with a solid arc-shaped mover used by tanker aircraft

Abstract

In this paper, an electric drive linear thruster is proposed, which is used to control the stretching and shrinking of the oil tube for the tanker aircraft. The major difficulty of this design is to minimize the volume and the weight of the electric actuator. After comparing the advantages and disadvantages of linear induction thruster with those of permanent magnet linear synchronous thruster, a curved-solid mover asynchronous linear thruster is presented, which reduces the volume and the weight of the device greatly by using the aluminum protection sleeve of the oil tube as the mover and also the secondary. In order to improve the output capability of the thruster, back iron with high permeability is added between the aluminum sleeve and oil tube. After that, the influence of the parameters of the air gap and back iron on the output capability of the thruster is analyzed and then the final scheme is determined. At last, simulation and analysis on the temperature rise of the mover and oil tube under different cooling air speed conditions is done to verify the security and practicability of the scheme.