The continued development of electro-hydrostatic actuators (EHAs) in aerospace applications has put forward an increasing demand upon EHA pumps for their high power density. Besides raising the delivery pressure, increasing the rotational speed is another effective way to achieve high power density of the pump, especially when the delivery pressure is limited by the strength of materials. However, high-speed operating conditions can lead to several challenges to the pump design. This paper reviews the current challenges including the cavitation, flow and pressure ripples, tilting motion of rotating group and heat problem, associated with a high-speed rotation. In addition, potential solutions to the challenges are summarized, and their advantages and limitations are analyzed in detail. Finally, future research trends in EHA pumps are suggested. It is hoped that this review can provide a full understanding of the speed limitations for EHA pumps and offer possible solutions to overcome them.

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Raising the rotational speed of electro-hydrostatic actuator (EHA) pumps is a useful way to improve their power density. However, gaseous cavitation tends to occur in the displacement chambers at high speed, reducing the effective delivery flow rate of EHA pumps. It is a common approach to reduce the gaseous cavitation by increasing the inlet pressure. However, this conventional approach requires additional devices to boost the inlet line, which decreases the EHA pump's power density. The contribution of this study is to reduce the gaseous cavitation by introducing inclined cylinder block ports for EHA pumps, which only modifies the cylinder ports and needs no additional devices. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed to investigate the effects of the inclined direction of cylinder ports on the gaseous cavitation. The simulation results showed that the inwardinclined design of cylinder ports could effectively decrease the gaseous cavitation using centrifugal effects of rotating fluid. Compared with a standard cylinder block, the cylinder block with inwardinclined ports could increase the effective delivery flow rate by 4% at an inlet pressure of 1 MPa and a rotational speed of 20,000 r/min. ARTICLE HISTORY

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