An ontological approach for classifying aircraft actuators

Today, electrification is a widely discussed topic within all fields of engineering and especially in the field ofaeronautics. Whether electrification of aircraft systems is the only viable option to overcome environmentalissues is a highly complex question which involves many aspects. In this paper, fundamental differences between electrified and hydraulic aircraft actuators are mapped, compared and discussed to understand how andif these systems can be compared without misleading results. In this paper, different actuator architectures were collected from literature, classified and analyzed by usingan ontological approach. The classification was created by utilizing defined classes where the class definitioncorresponded to the functional requirements which had to be fulfilled by the actuator architecture. This work has shown that ontologies can sufficiently be used for classification of actuator architectures. Thebuilt in reasoner can be used to sort a large set of actuators into comparable classes. Meanwhile, the ontologydefines a framework where important information of the actuators and their components can be stored andstructured.