Reliability and global sensitivity analysis for an airplane slat mechanism considering wear degradation

This paper focuses on the issue of reliability and global sensitivity analysis for an airplane slat mechanism considering the uncertainties in the wear process of mechanical components. First, the multi-body kinematic model of the slat mechanism is built in the ADAMS software. The geometrical sizes of the roller wheels after wear degradation are considered as input variables and the angle the slat should turn is considered as the output response. To accurately identify the influential roller wheels to the reliability and robustness of the slat mechanism, the failure probability based sensitivity and variance-based sensitivity indices are introduced. Comprehensive analysis of the results have shown that the reliability analysis and global sensitivity theory can help engineers find significant parts by their contributions, thus provide guidance for mechanical design and maintenance.