Influence of asymmetrical factors on aircraft ground steering stability

Abstract

An aircraft taxiing on the ground is affected by several nonlinear forces so that the directional instability may occur during the steering process, and the asymmetric factors could exacerbate this phenomenon. A nonlinear asymmetrical aircraft ground taxiing dynamic model is established in MATLAB/Simulink in this study. Then the numerical continuation method based on the bifurcation theory is used to study the influence of the asymmetrical aircraft structure on the taxiing directional stability by taking the distance between the eccentric mass and the aircraft symmetry plane as the bifurcation parameter. In addition, a dual-parameter bifurcation is conducted to study the influence of the nose-wheel steering angle and the asymmetrical mass eccentric distance on the directional stability. Moreover, the effect of the asymmetrical thrust on the taxiing steering bifurcation characteristics is investigated, and the instability mechanism is revealed by analyzing the aircraft taxiing motion states under five working conditions. Then the dual-parameter bifurcation curves are obtained by introducing the nose wheel steering angle as the additional bifurcation parameter. The Bogdanov-Takens (BT) bifurcation and the Generalized Hopf (GH) bifurcation in the nonlinear ground turning dynamic system are also discussed. The results show that the asymmetrical factors can significantly affect the aircraft ground taxiing directional stability.