Reliability Assessment and Improvement for Aircraft Lock Mechanism with Multiple Failure Modes

In an aircraft, the lock mechanism is one of the important components of the landing gear door lock system, whose working performance affects the aircraft flight performance directly. This research focuses on reliability assessment and reliability improvement of the locking process of an aircraft lock mechanism. First, according to the motion principle of the aircraft lock mechanism, a simulation model of the locking process is built by LMS Virtual.Lab simulation platform. Then, two performance functions of the two critical failure modes of the locking process about maximum locking resistance and required time are established, respectively. Subsequently, Kriging model and importance sampling method are combined to evaluate the reliability of the locking process. Finally, the reliability sensitivity is analyzed to identify critical variables which influence the reliability. Three cases are analyzed by adjusting the parameters of the two most critical variables, and the results show that the system reliability and the reliability of each failure mode are improved during the locking process of the aircraft lock mechanism.