Nonstationary random parametric vibration in light aircraft landing gear

In this work, a new approach for analysis of random vibration in light aircraft landing gear for a given duty cycle is developed and studied, The aircraft is modeled as a linear, single-degree-of-freedom oscillator with random properties, including nonstationary damping and random nonstationary load, Note that this type of problem is difficult to analyze efficiently using most conventional techniques. Two approaches to analyze the random vibration of the system are examined: a new variant of the random matrix approach, a statistical random vibration analysis method developed previously by the authors; and a hybrid Monte Carlo technique containing a spectral representation approach and a variant of Latin hypercube sampling, Random response results are shown for two light aircraft landing on three different terrain types using each method, and comparisons are offered. These results show that Monte Carlo analysis cannot compute accurate solutions for this problem, It is anticipated that the proposed random matrix technique could be used in conjunction with current fatigue analysis methods so that accurate landing gear fatigue information may be computed.