Adaptive landing gear concept—feedback control validation

The objective of this paper is to present an integrated feedback control concept for adaptive landing gears (ALG) and its experimental validation. Aeroplanes are subjected to high dynamic loads as a result of the impact during each landing. Classical landing gears, which are in common use, are designed in accordance with official regulations in a way that ensures the optimal energy dissipation for the critical (maximum) sink speed. The regulations were formulated in order to ensure the functional capability of the landing gears during an emergency landing. However, the landing gears, whose characteristics are optimized for these critical conditions, do not perform well under normal impact conditions. For that situation it is reasonable to introduce a system that would adapt the characteristics of the landing gears according to the sink speed of landing. The considered system assumes adaptation of the damping force generated by the landing gear, which would perform optimally in an emergency situation and would adapt itself for regular landings as well. This research covers the formulation and design of the control algorithms for an adaptive landing gear based on MR fluid, implementation of the algorithms on an FPGA platform and experimental verification on a lab-scale landing gear device. The main challenge of the research was to develop a control methodology that could operate effectively within 50 ms, which is assumed to be the total duration of the phenomenon. The control algorithm proposed in this research was able to control the energy dissipation process on the experimental stand.