The impact of structural optimization is growing in many industries due to economic pressures demanding efficiency in the design process. This efficiency implies developing products which are cost effective and ahead of the competition at the same time. The motivation of the present work is to provide the structural design engineer with tools of optimization techniques and practices that have been applied successfully to landing gears.
Modern landing gears have to meet a multitude of landing and ground handling design loads whose magnitudes are several times the gross weight of the aircraft. All the design loads have to be investigated and their effect on each component must be evaluated. Furthermore, the response of the landing gears to all the design loads must be constrained to satisfy the design requirements while minimizing its structural weight. The weight of the landing gear is becoming an ever more important factor, as inefficient design can add unnecessary weight to the aircraft and, consequently, decrease the payload or useful load.
Typical design examples of components of landing gears are presented that demonstrate the performance of STARSTRUC as an effective weight optimization design tool. The minimum weight design is achieved when the landing gear is subjected to behavior constraints on stresses, deflections, buckling, and frequencies of vibration.