MIE301 Course Project: Nose Landing Gear Design

One of the third-year core courses of the University of Toronto mechanical engineering is called Kinematics and Dynamics of Machines. This project was from this course. The project is to design, analyze, and optimize a machine which can be chosen by the team. We chose fixed-wing nose landing gear as the project topic.

The project required us to come up with one current design which we would optimize later. This does not need multiple design candidates and a decision matrix as long as the design consists of linkages/gears covered in the lecture and functional. Therefore I came up with a design:

Right after I had the drawing, I immediately put it into the SolidWorks CAD to demonstrate the motion of the landing gear and create the CAD which we could work on the optimization later as a reference.

All parts were able to move within the assembly, and positive feedback was received from the TA. This is a simplified design of the fixed-wing nose landing gear to stay within the scope of the course.

Then based on this design, our team used Matlab to analyze the retraction speed of the current design and finished a force analysis (finding the reaction force that acts on the damper) both on paper and using Matlab for this design.

To optimize the current design, we aimed to increase the retraction speed and reduce the reaction force that acts on the damper. After the candidate design selection and decision-making, we chose to add an actuator inside the input link to retract further and increase the retraction speed.

To reduce the reaction force, we changed the position of the wheel making it closer to the damper which reduced the reaction force. The force and retraction speed analysis was also done in this part to show how much optimization was done based on the current design.