High-lift control systems of commercial transport aircraft increase lift during low speed phases and keep the landing speed in reasonable limits. Today’s high-lift control systems consist of leading and trailing-edge devices which are actuated over established mechanical transmission shafts driven by central power control units. With the ongoing trend of more-electric aircraft and potential benefits by functional enhancement of the flight control system, new possibilities arise for future high-lift system architectures. One promising approach is a distributed electric drive architecture. This provides the opportunity to enable advanced high-lift control systems with multifunctional control surfaces driven by electrical actuators. In this contribution, a conventional high-lift system architecture - which serves as a reference system – and three distributed system architectures using electrical actuators are developed. The trailing-edge actuation system has been chosen as a representative example for this study. The system architectures are developed in an iterative design process to fulfill the high-lift system requirements, and comply with the safety regulations. Furthermore, the system masses and operating costs are estimated to evaluate the different system architectures. Finally, it can be stated, that distributed system architectures show advantages regarding overall system mass and direct operating costs compared to the conventional, reference system architecture.      «

High-lift control systems of commercial transport aircraft increase lift during low speed phases and keep the landing speed in reasonable limits. Today’s high-lift control systems consist of leading and trailing-edge devices which are actuated over established mechanical transmission shafts driven by central power control units. With the ongoing trend of more-electric aircraft and potential benefits by functional enhancement of the flight control system, new possibilities arise for future high-l...     »