On the effectiveness of shimmy dampers in stabilizing nose landing gears

Abstract The challenge of nose landing gear shimmy vibrations is largely addressed through adding passive shimmy suppression devices to the gear, known as shimmy dampers. Despite the wide treatment of the shimmy modeling in the literature using various approaches, little is known about shimmy dampers' performance and their influence on the dynamics. This article presents a multi degree of freedom nose landing gear model including a two-piece strut, with a generic shimmy damper added in between of the strut parts as it is the case in the actual system. Using linear stability analysis and nonlinear time domain simulations, we identify the required equivalent stiffness and damping to be supplied by the shimmy damper in order to ensure stability of the dynamic system. Furthermore, a parametric study of three shimmy dampers is presented in which effect of design parameters on the equivalent stiffness and damping of shimmy dampers are highlighted and compared. Integrating the learnings from both parts of the study, strategies for arriving at an optimized shimmy damper design are offered.

[1]  Wolf Krüger,et al.  DESIGN AND SIMULATION OF SEMI-ACTIVE LANDING GEARS FOR TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT* , 2002 .

[2]  Mark H Lowenberg,et al.  Influence of Tire Inflation Pressure on Nose Landing Gear Shimmy , 2010 .

[3]  Marco Morandini,et al.  Recent developments at the numerical simulation of landing gear dynamics , 2011 .

[4]  Ibrahim Ozkol,et al.  Application of a magnetorheological damper modeled using the current–dependent Bouc–Wen model for shimmy suppression in a torsional nose landing gear with and without freeplay , 2014 .

[5]  Simon A Neild,et al.  Using continuation analysis to identify shimmy-suppression devices for an aircraft main landing gear , 2017 .

[6]  Mark H Lowenberg,et al.  Bifurcation Analysis of Nose-Landing-Gear Shimmy with Lateral and Longitudinal Bending , 2010 .

[7]  H. Tourajizadeh,et al.  Robust and optimal control of shimmy vibration in aircraft nose landing gear , 2016 .

[8]  Mark H Lowenberg,et al.  Effects of Freeplay on Dynamic Stability of an Aircraft Main Landing Gear , 2013 .

[9]  Prashant Dilip Khapane,et al.  Gear walk instability studies using flexible multibody dynamics simulation methods in SIMPACK , 2005 .

[10]  Mark H Lowenberg,et al.  Shimmy of an Aircraft Main Landing Gear With Geometric Coupling and Mechanical Freeplay , 2015 .

[11]  Niranjan K. Sura,et al.  Lateral Response of Nonlinear Nose Wheel Landing Gear Models with Torsional Free-play , 2007 .

[12]  Kamran Behdinan,et al.  Linear Stability Analysis and Dynamic Response of Shimmy Dampers for Main Landing Gears , 2016 .

[13]  Xinyu Geng,et al.  An efficient single-loop strategy for reliability-based multidisciplinary design optimization under non-probabilistic set theory , 2018 .

[14]  John Kennedy,et al.  Effect of noise reducing components on nose landing gear stability for a mid-size aircraft coupled with vortex shedding and freeplay , 2015 .

[15]  Andrés García-Pérez,et al.  Dynamic coupling on the design of space structures , 2019, Aerospace Science and Technology.

[16]  James T. Gordon.  Perturbation Analysis of Nonlinear Wheel Shimmy , 2001 .

[17]  Mark H Lowenberg,et al.  Interaction of torsion and lateral bending in aircraft nose landing gear shimmy , 2009 .

[18]  Zhitao Song,et al.  Shimmy Simulation and Virtual Verification for Amphibious Aircraft’s Landing Gear Airworthiness Certification , 2018 .

[19]  Niranjan K. Sura,et al.  Lateral Stability of Aircraft Nose-Wheel Landing Gear with Closed-Loop Shimmy Damper , 2009 .

[20]  Marco Morandini,et al.  Anti-skid induced aircraft landing gear instability , 2008 .

[21]  Jinxiong Zhou,et al.  Incremental harmonic balance method for predicting amplitudes of a multi-d.o.f. non-linear wheel shimmy system with combined Coulomb and quadratic damping , 2005 .

[22]  K. Behdinan,et al.  Investigation on the effect of coulomb friction on nose landing gear shimmy , 2019 .

[23]  Niranjan K. Sura,et al.  Closed Form Analytical Solution for the Shimmy Instability of Nose-Wheel Landing Gears , 2007 .

[24]  Earl H. Dowell,et al.  Landing Gear Design/Maintenance Analysis for Nonlinear Shimmy , 2015 .

[25]  William E. Krabacher.  A Comparison of the Moreland and Von Schlippe-Dietrich Landing Gear Tire Shimmy Models , 1997 .

[26]  Eleonora Neri,et al.  Bay cavity noise for full-scale nose landing gear: A comparison between experimental and numerical results , 2018 .

[27]  A. Alaimo,et al.  A robust active control system for shimmy damping in the presence of free play and uncertainties , 2017 .

[28]  Ebrahim Esmailzadeh,et al.  Shimmy Vibration Analysis of Aircraft Landing Gears , 1999 .

[29]  Kivanc Ekici,et al.  Revisiting the One-shot method for modeling limit cycle oscillations: Extension to two-degree-of-freedom systems , 2017 .