Students study to reduce the weight of aircraft landing gear

Nghia’s research on optimizing the landing gear of the F-16 Fighting Falcon USA fighter won the Most Improved Award of the year at the Altair Global Student Contest, worth 1,800 USD. The contest was organized by Altair – an American company specializing in providing cloud storage and analysis technology software on a global scale. The playground was held from May 2023 to April 2024 with more than 1,000 contestants from 18 countries.

The research was conducted by Nghia, a fourth-year student at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Vietnam-Germany University, on the US military’s F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet. According to Nghia, the landing gear accounts for about 5% of the total mass of the aircraft, and can be optimized to reduce mass, so that the aircraft can operate quickly, reduce costs, and still ensure safety.

The landing gear is located at the bottom of the fuselage and is responsible for helping the aircraft run on the runway during takeoff and landing. This is one of the important, complex and expensive parts. According to Nghia, the materials used to make the landing gear are made from many types of alloys, titanium, aluminum… with high-precision manufacturing and processing techniques to ensure safety. “Modern aircraft design landing gear with the lightest weight but still ensure safety and good operation. This part is always designed to be lighter through generations of aircraft,” Nghia said.

The F-16 fighter landing gear has many parts such as V-shaped landing gear, electrical system, brake system, shock absorbers, wheels… Nghia focused on optimizing the part with the most mass, the V-shaped landing gear – considered the backbone of the aircraft landing gear.

Using specialized design software, the author selects the optimal model, sets up conditions, adjusts parameters, simulates and optimizes the product. During these steps, Nghia must learn about the conditions of force, moment, and force application point acting on the model. This step requires a lot of calculation and the use of a laboratory to measure parameters through sensors. After that, Nghia uses software to set up a simulation of the landing gear movement during landing.

Based on the calculation model, Nghia determined that the F-16’s landing gear could be optimized by 44%, meaning it would be 44% lighter than the current version. The weight reduction would help reduce the aircraft’s operating and fuel costs.

Nghia reduced the weight of the landing gear on the model while still ensuring safety. For example, the safety factor on an airplane is about 5.0, meaning that if the design can withstand a maximum load of 1 ton, the actual load is 4-5 tons, the airplane can still withstand. According to the calculation model, Nghia’s landing gear design ensures safety.

Technically, for a more accurate assessment, the landing gear must be calculated along with the parameters of the shock absorber system, wheel deformation, and moving axes… This helps researchers to simulate the aircraft’s landing performance closely.

Nghia plans to test the model with metal materials and research, creating a complete product with full electrical systems, braking systems, pneumatic shock absorbers, simulating a lighter version of the F-16 landing gear.

Master Do Quy Duyen, Lecturer of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Vietnam-Germany University, said that after Nghia designed the model, the school created conditions for the laboratory and supported students with 3D printers to create sample products. Master Duyen suggested that optimizing aircraft landing gear requires practical testing to evaluate technical and safety indicators to prove the theoretical basis. According to him, testing on the F-16 fighter jet is very difficult because the input technical indicators for the landing gear are within the scope of military secrets.