11 - Operations and Sustainment
DIGITAL TWIN OF AN AIRCRAFT LANDING GEAR TO ENHANCE FAILURE ANALYSIS AND MANAGE PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE
D.Y. Sabag¹, O. Yakimenko, Naval Postgraduate School, United States; H. Alian¹; ¹Israeli Air Force, Israel
The aviation industry strives to implement innovative technologies to improve aircraft performance, efficiency and safety. Digital twin technology creates a virtual representation of physical assets and have already proved to have a great potential for a variety of areas including predictive maintenance and advanced analytics. This paper discusses the development of a digital twin for aircraft’s landing gear system to monitor and predict wear rates in bushings and enable condition-based maintenance.rnThe drag-brace subsystem of an aircraft stabilizes the landing gear during ground operations, and usually undergoes iterative redesigns to address cracking from metal fatigue over decades of service. Developing an accurate digital twin of this system enables batch simulations that could help with predicting wear rates in joints depending on the actual loads on the components during the high-stress landing phase in variable conditions.rnThis paper focuses on the development of a digital twin of the landing gear system based on physics and available landing data. Specifically, this paper presents the results of the study examining the evolution of wear in the landing gear joint as a function of aircraft operation environment. It involves detailed dynamic modeling of the wear and performing laboratory experiments to investigate the wear phenomenon in the landing gear bushings influenced by several parameters. It also incorporates continuously updated landing parameters database composed of the time histories of the velocity and acceleration vector components before, at, and right after a touchdown event as recorded for an individual aircraft in a specific flight configuration. These data are eventually converted into loads and moments developing in the joints and calculates the expected wear rate, which allows to reduce after-the-flight inspection time and increase the sortie rate.rnThis paper aims at promoting the adoption of advanced digital twin