Design and Analysis of a Magnetorheological Damper for Airplane Landing Gear

Abstract

Airplane landing gears are subjected to a wide range of excitation conditions due to variations in sink speed and road condition. An existing passive type damper for the landing gear is hard to satisfy these various conditions. A semi-active type magnetorheological (MR) damper is one of attractive solutions to resolve this problem. This work presents design and analysis of MR damper applicable to the landing gear system. MR damper is designed based on the required damping force and packaging constraints. Especially, the geometry of the magnetic core is optimized in terms of magnetic intensity at magnetic poles to achieve uniform magnetic intensity under the packaging constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed MR damper is given by presenting the field-dependent damping force and the efficiency.