Safety Assessment of Protection Cover under the Blast Pressure of Aircraft Tire Blowout

The protection cover is an important equipment installed in the main landing gear cabin to protect the hydraulic lines and equipment. To assess the safety of the protection cover, the authors conducted an experimental and numerical study on the dynamic responses of protection cover in the main landing gear cabin under blast pressure of aircraft tire blowout, and the influences of various blast conditions were discussed. In the experimental study, three protection covers with different burst target points and tire inflation pressure were tested. Based on the data recorded by the pressure transducers, a new blast function in the time and space domains was proposed to describe the pressure distribution on the outer surface of the protection cover during the process of aircraft tire blowout. To validate the proposed burst model and finite-element model of protection cover, the simulations results were compared with the experimental results. It shows that the numerical calculations and experiment results exhibit a satisfactory agreement, which indicates that the models in the present study are reliable and can be used for further studies. Moreover, considering the influences of the burst target point and the tire inflation pressure, the dynamic responses of the protection cover were analyzed in detail with the finite-element method. According to the numerical simulation results, when at a certain inflation pressure, the protection cover is found to undergo the severest impact with the burst target point A, which is close to the center of the protection cover. (c) 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.