The Kinematic Design and Weight Estimation of a Flying V Main Landing Gear

Abstract

At a time when there is a distinct drive for accelerated sustainability the Flying V is a promising new aircraft configuration with the potential for significantly higher efficiency than the current state-of-the-art. Up until this point the Landing Gear layout has only been investigated at an aircraft-level meaning there is limited knowledge on the systems integration with the surrounding environment. Given that the landing gear is a safety-critical component that makes up to 5\% of the MTOW, the parameters which drive the weights effects must be understood. The aim of this thesis which is to increase the fidelity of the weight estimation of an operationally-feasible main landing gear by maximising the use of physics-based calculations. The model development is performed in collaboration with the Airbus Future Projects Office in Hamburg.

The previous landing gear topology is first refined to address certain complexities in the kinematic design which do not align with typical commercial operations. The refined kinematic significantly reduces size of the lower wing fairing and reduces the added bogie rotation in the previous design. The primary components of mechanism are deemed operationally feasible yet certain components need to be added to validate a full kinematic. The geometry is discretised and a minimisation function is run in order to size the thickness of each tubular element based on selected sizing ground loads. The weight of a single main landing gear is obtained and the structural efficiency is compared to that of known landing gears of state-of-the-art aircraft. Furthermore a sensitivity study was conducted to understand the effect of landing gear length on weight and conclusions drawn on limitations of the tool.

Overall, the new kinematic design proposal is evidence of a potential mechanism that fullfills key design considerations in the scope of the available design space. Furthermore, the physics-based weight estimation provides new data and knowledge for future work on Flying V landing gears.