Non-linear Shimmy Analysis of a Nose Landing Gear with Free-play

Abstract

In this paper, we studied the shimmy phenomena of an aircraft nose landing gear considering free-play. Shimmy is a self-excited vibration in lateral and torsional directions of a landing gear during either the take-off or landing. This phenomena is caused by a couple of conditions such as low torsional stiffness of the strut, friction and free-play in the gear, wheel imbalance, or worn parts, and it may make an aircraft unstable. Free-play non-linearity is linearized by the described function for a stability analysis in a frequency domain, and time marching is performed using the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method. We performed the numerical simulation of the nose landing gear shimmy and investigated its linear and nonlinear characteristics. From the numerical results, we found limit-cycle-oscillations at the speed under linear shimmy speed for the case considering free-play and it can be concluded that the shimmy stability can be decreased by free-play.