Research on landing gear strut damping orifice design based on nurbs for optimizing aircraft ground dynamics

The structure of shock strut is of great importance to safely and efficiently absorb and dissipate the huge shock energy during large aircrafts landing process. As a very good modelling method, NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-Splines) can easily and effectively construct complex curve contours through a few control points and parameters, and is suitable for modelling, simulation and algorithm optimization by computer. A generative method based on NURBS is developed and implemented for aircraft landing gear hydraulic damping orifice design to optimize aircraft ground dynamics. A generic framework is developed representing the characteristics of aircraft ground dynamics, and applied into a specified aircraft landing gear strut hydraulic damping orifice design. Using this method, the NURBS parameterization of metering pin profile correlated to the strut hydraulic orifice is automatically generated. In addition, the ground dynamics is effectively reduced with specific computer algorithm for ulti-objective optimization. The results proves that the strut damping performance is greatly enhanced, enabling the aircraft o be operated at a lower peak dynamic load condition, and providing potential to reduce the aircraft structure mass weight and improve the passenger comfort.