Stress analysis of Landing gear of light Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

The landing gear system of an aircraft absorbs energy from the impact of landing. Numerical simulation has become great tool for the assessment of the landing gear dynamics as well as for aircraft structure and landing gear interaction. This paper basically describes the normal structural behavior of a simple landing gear structure model system and accurately simulates the energy absorbed by the gear system without adding substantial complexity with the model. It carries the structure aircraft weight at all required ground operations including landing, take off, taxiing and towing. The stress results obtained from the finite element analysis is used to calculate the factor of safety. This work also focuses on landing gear of small unmanned aerial vehicles, where the landing gears used are of leaf spring type. It has been seen that the stresses are very high during greater impact speeds, which resulted in less factor of safety.