Including Inerters in Aircraft Landing Gear Shock Strut to Improve the Touch-down Performance

Abstract

This paper presents the possibility of using inerter-based shock strut in a landing gear to improve aircraft touch-down performance. The inerter is a mechanical element with the property that the applied force is proportional to the relative acceleration between its terminals. The baseline performance of a traditional oleo-pneumatic shock strut is established using a simplified landing gear touch-down model. Several simple layouts and general transfer functions are used to represent the shock struts and time-domain optimisations are carried out to minimise the maximum strut load transmitted to the fuselage during touch-down. The performance benefits of several inerter-based shock strut configurations with the corresponding parameter values have been identified.