The Development of the Bow-Type Composite Landing Structure for Light Air Vehicles

摘要

Bow-type structures are usually chosen to be the landing gear of light flight vehicles. Due to the special complex geometries, the metal landing gears made by either bending forming or machining are easily over weight or cost and having residual stress around the bending area. On the other hand, having the high strength-to-weight and high stiffness-to-weight ratios and the design and manufacturing flexibility, composites are selected as the landing bows of light air vehicles. In this paper, two low cost room temperature cured graphite/epoxy landing bows are presented. First, the graphite fabric skin and PU foam core were wet-layed in a mold using epoxy resin. Second, the braided graphite tube skin and PU foam core were arranged in a mold and epoxy resin transferred to fill the mold. The static test was then applied to the composite bows to verify the structural strength. The result shows the closeness of theoretical calculations and experiments of the failure strength of the landing bows. Therefore, the design and manufacturing processes of composite landing structures were verified to the requirements and have been in producton.