Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
This paper investigates the feasibility of improving the aircraft landing performance by design the damping orifice parameters of the landing gear using lattice Boltzmann method coupled with the response surface method. The LBM is utilised to simulate characteristics of the damping orifice after model validation. The numerical model of the landing gear using simulated damping force is validated by single landing gear drop test. Based on the numerical model and the response surface functions, the sensitivity analysis and the optimisation design are performed. The maximum error of mean velocity simulated using LBM with experimental data is 7.07% for sharp-edged orifices. Moreover, the numerical model predicts the landing responses adequately, the maximum error with drop test data is 2.51%. The max overloading of the aircraft decreases by 5.44% after optimisation, which proves that this method is feasible to design the damping orifice for good landing performance.