Conventional hydraulic actuators in aircraft systems are high maintenance and more vulnerable to high temperatures and pressures. This usually leads to high operating costs and low efficiency. With the rapid development of More/All Electric technology, power-by-wire actuators are being broadly employed to improve the maintainability, reliability, and manoeuvrability of future aircraft. This paper reviews the published application and development of the airborne linear electromechanical actuator. First, the general configuration, merits, and limitations of the gear-drive electromechanical actuator and the direct-drive electromechanical actuator are analysed. Second, the development state of the electromechanical actuator testing systems is elaborated in three aspects, namely the performance testing based on room temperature, testing in a thermal vacuum environment, and iron bird. Common problems and tendencies of the testing systems are summarized. Key technologies and research challenges are revealed in terms of fault-tolerant motor, high-thrust mechanical transmission, multidisciplinary modelling, thermal management, and thermal analysis. Finally, the trend for future electromechanical actuators in More/All Electric Aircraft applications is summarized, and future research on the airborne linear electromechanical actuators is discussed.

The knee joint, as the main lower limb motor joint, is the most vulnerable and susceptible joint. The knee injuries considerably impact the normal living ability and mental health of patients. Understanding the biomechanics of a normal and diseased knee joint is in urgent need for designing knee assistive devices and optimizing a rehabilitation exercise program. In this paper, we systematically searched electronic databases (from 2000 to November 2019) including ScienceDirect, Web of Science, PubMed, Google Scholar, and IEEE/IET Electronic Library for potentially relevant articles. After duplicates were removed and inclusion criteria applied to the titles, abstracts, and full text, 138 articles remained for review. The selected articles were divided into two groups to be analyzed. Firstly, the real movement of a normal knee joint and the normal knee biomechanics of four kinds of daily motions in the sagittal and coronal planes, which include normal walking, running, stair climbing, and sit-to-stand, were discussed and analyzed. Secondly, an overview of the current knowledge on the movement biomechanical effects of common knee musculoskeletal disorders and knee neurological disorders were provided. Finally, a discussion of the existing problems in the current studies and some recommendation for future research were presented. In general, this review reveals that there is no clear assessment about the biomechanics of normal and diseased knee joints at the current state of the art. The biomechanics properties could be significantly affected by knee musculoskeletal or neurological disorders. Deeper understanding of the biomechanics of the normal and diseased knee joint will still be an urgent need in the future.

A comprehensive contact analysis model to determine the contact positions and clearances of mating thread surfaces in the planetary roller screw mechanism (PRSM) is proposed in this paper. By introducing a three-dimensional clearance vector, the modified conditions of continuous tangency of mating surfaces are established, in which the clearances along all the directions and contact positions of an arbitrary pair of mating surfaces can be calculated. The deviations of the screw, roller, and nut from their nominal positions are considered in the transformation matrices, which describe the position relations of the screw, roller, and nut. Then, the equations of thread surfaces with deviations are derived. Using the modified conditions and the equations of surfaces, the meshing equations at the screw–roller and nut–roller interfaces are derived to compute the clearances along all the directions and contact positions of mating thread surfaces on each pair of thread teeth in the imperfect PRSM. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified by comparing the contact positions at the screw–roller interface with those from the previously published model. Then, the effect of the direction of clearance vector on the clearances and contact positions is analyzed and discussed. Because of the roller deviation, the clearances between multiple pairs of thread teeth are no longer identical, and the contact positions of a pair of mating thread surfaces on different pairs of thread teeth are different. Also, the parameters of a PRSM without clearances can be obtained from the proposed model in the design process.

To improve the fault diagnosis performance for rotating machinery, an efficient, noise-resistant end-to-end deep learning (DL) algorithm is proposed based on the advantages of the wavelet packet transform in vibration signal processing (the capability to extract multiscale information and more spectral distribution features) and deep convolutional neural networks (good classification performance, data-driven design and high transfer-learning ability). First, a vibration signal is subjected to pyramid wavelet packet decomposition, and each sub-band coefficient is used as the input for each channel of a deep convolutional network (DCN). Then, based on the lightweight modeling requirements and techniques, a new DCN structure is designed for the fault diagnosis. The proposed algorithm is compared with the support vector machine algorithm and the published DL algorithms based on a bearing dataset produced by Case Western Reserve University. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to the existing algorithms in terms of accuracy, memory space, computational complexity, noise resistance, and transfer performance, producing good results.

A model of load distribution over threads of planetary roller screw mechanism (PRSM) is developed according to the relationships of deformation compatibility and force equilibrium. In order to make the applied load of PRSM uniformly distributed over threads, an improvement approach is proposed, in which the parameters of thread form of roller and nut are redesigned, and the contact conditions of roller with screw and nut are changed to compensate the axial accumulative deformation of shaft sections of screw and nut. A typical planetary roller screw mechanism is taken as example to analyze the load distribution, and the effects of installation configurations, load conditions and thread form parameters on load distribution are studied. Furthermore, the improvement approach is applied to the PRSM, and it is proved to be beneficial to reach uniform load distribution over threads.