Institut national des sciences appliquées de Toulouse

The Clément Ader Institute "ICA", is a French public research laboratory, has been created in June 2009 in order to merge all laboratories dedicated to Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering in the “Midi-Pyrénées” region. ICA is steered by the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Toulouse (INSA), one of the six public engineering schools of the INSA network that graduates every year 12% of the registered engineers in France. ICA involves up of 75 teaching and research staff, 19 temporary researchers, 32 support staff, 90 PhD students and numerous people gaining work experience. The laboratory is organized in four research groups; among them, the Modeling of Structures, Systems and Microsystems (MS2M) group and the Surface, Machining, Materials, Tools (SUMO) group. MS2M group develops one of its research topics in the model based design of embedded actuators and actuation systems, headed by Pr jean-Charles MARE. This topic provides expert competencies for the project in actuation for aerospace.

The research team involved in the project has a long experience in the preliminary design, the modeling, the simulation and the testing of aerospace actuators. In the past 10 years, the competency initially focused on servohydraulic actuators, has been deeply extended to electromechanical actuators.

Since 2001, the research team has been involved in major European (FP5 POA, FP5 ADVACT, FP6 DRESS, FP7 A2015) or national projects (Mosart-Macao, CISACS, Presage, Syrena) dealing with more electrical actuation for aerospace.