Approach to prevent locking in a spring-damper system by adaptive load redistribution in auxiliary kinematic guidance elements

In many applications, kinematic structures are used to enable and disable degrees of freedom. The relative movement between a wheel and the body of a car or a landing gear and an aircraft fuselage are examples for a defined movement. In most cases, a spring-damper system determines the kinetic properties of the movement. However, unexpected high load peaks may lead to maximum displacements and maybe to locking. Thus, a hard clash between two rigid components may occur, causing acceleration peaks. This may have harmful effects for the whole system. For example a hard landing of an aircraft can result in locking the landing gear and thus damage the entire aircraft. In this paper, the potential of adaptive auxiliary kinematic guidance elements in a spring-damper system to prevent locking is investigated numerically. The aim is to provide additional forces in the auxiliary kinematic guidance elements in case of overloading the spring-damper system and thus to absorb some of the impact energy. To estimate the potential of the load redistribution in the spring-damper system, a numerical model of a two-mass oscillator is used, similar to a quarter-car-model. In numerical calculations, the reduction of the acceleration peaks of the masses with the adaptive approach is compared to the Acceleration peaks without the approach, or, respectively, when locking is not prevented. In addition, the required force of the adaptive auxiliary kinematic guidance elements is calculated as a function of the masses of the system and the drop height, or, respectively, the impact energy.