Influence of Nose Landing Gear Torsional Damping on the Stability of Aircraft Taxiing Direction

Abstract

The design of the nose landing gear (NLG) torsional damping is very important to avoid the taxiing vibration of the aircraft. On the one hand, increasing the torsional damping can suppress the nose wheel shimmy. On the other hand, if the design value is too large, it will cause unstable vibration of the aircraft direction, and the latter will often be ignored, which will bring potential risks to the taxiing safety of the aircraft. In this paper, by establishing a multibody dynamics model (MBD) of aircraft taxiing, including NLG, main landing gear (MLG), airframe, related force elements and kinematic pairs, the effect of the torsional damping of NLG on aircraft directional stability is studied, and the key taxiing parameters of aircraft taxiing in an unstable direction are obtained. In order to propose the damping design specification for the nose landing gear anti-shimmy system, the critical value of torsional damping for stable taxiing in the direction of the aircraft is calculated. It is found that nose wheel shimmy and the unstable vibration of the aircraft direction will occur simultaneously, but the vibration frequencies are different. Therefore, in addition to the anti-shimmy design, the influence of the aircraft’s directional unstable vibration must also be considered in the engineering application.