A sky-ground hook controller for efficiency enhancement of aircraft landing gear with MR damper

Abstract

In this study, a semi-active magnetorheological (MR) damper for the main landing gear suspension system of the aircraft is proposed. MR damper is designed with two magnetic cores to control the effective damping force and also with annular bypass for fast expanding speed considering the characteristics of the aircraft landing. A controllable yield force of the MR fluid with respect to the input current is analyzed as a first step, and a vertical landing model with MR damper is considered to evaluate aircraft landing efficiency. In this work, a sky-ground controller is designed and applied to MR damper to maximize the landing efficiency of the drop simulation. The damping force of MR damper is controlled by the input current calculated by the proper choice of the sky hook gain and ground hook gain, respectively. It is demonstrated through the comparative work between the passive and proposed semi-active MR damper based landing gear that the landing gear efficiency of the passive damper can be enhanced a lot showing the efficiency above 90%.