Landing gear

[cyt4]

I wanted to pick people's brains on if you had the chance to become a dedicated landing gear stress analyst would you? It seems to me that there are not many landing gear "experts" in the industry.

And for veteran landing gear analysts: do you regret the choice as it locked you into a very specialized topic? Or maybe it doesn't really pay well?

I am kind of at that crossroad to become a dedicated landing gear guy. Any input is welcome.

 

[GregLocock]

I design suspensions for cars. I'd say it would be a good field to get into, heavy, expensive, relatively cheap to test, easy to model in the appropriate software, lots of loud noises and bent parts to play with.



Cheers

Greg Locock


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[Panther140]

That is work that I would find interesting. There is a lot of money in that industry as well. You also wouldn't be trapped if you did that for a few years. A good way to tell somebody that you're trustworthy is telling them that you designed landing gear for 10 years and nobody died in the process.

"Formal education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." ~ Joseph Stalin

 

[racookpe1978]

The experience KNOWING the details of elastic reactions and and how to analyze extreme (short-time, high intensity) impact forces in dynamic situations will put you in a short list of people needed.

Look, for example, at the number of multiple-dozens of times people in the structural and mechanical forums have asked about impact problems and impact/explosive stresses and deformations. Static analysis? Not easy. Dynamic analysis - especially involving deformation and energy absorption? Very very difficult.

Now, against that very real "market" slightly outside of the landing gear/wheel suspension markets is the size of that total dynamic analysis market, and the question of whether you personally can actually solve the problems analyzing the difficult problems in that market.

 

[IRstuff]

While being that specialized makes you unique, it makes you unique. WHEN, and only WHEN, a company needs that special skill, they'll pay through the nose for that skill, but what happens afterwards? Unless you work as a consultant, and can bounce to another, similar, task, you'll wind up doing more mundane things, and possibly start to lose your edge. Or, you might want to look to large consulting firms like Altair Engineering

http://www.altairhyperworks.com/

You need to consider what the people who designed the B-767 or A-320 landing gear are doing now. That'll give you an idea of what to expect

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[cyt4]

I see. I guess rather than specializing in landing gear, it might be more beneficial to specialize in dynamic and nonlinear analysis and learn about general methods to employ for lots of other projects. There are not many new landing gears needed in the industry after all.Where I am at, not a lot of people are experienced in nonlinear analysis(contacts, materials, geometry). I might go into consultancy one day but still seems distant for now though

 

[GregLocock]

That's a good approach. Non linear dynamics is unendingly complex, and you have the great advantage in the FEA world of using one of the nicer packages, LS DYNA. On the mechanism side you've got a bunch of choices, if you can make sense of it then modelica may be the way to go. I found the user community arrogant and useless (several years back), but there are commercial versions such as Dymola who may be less unhelpful. There are many alternatives, crucial, in my experience, is the ability to work with real world data. I'd be intrigued to see a Simulink based solution for example, as i could then suck all the file formats into matlab and play with them there.

Cheers

Greg Locock


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[BUGGAR]

Vehicle crash absorption via landing gear (or other mechanisms) and all the related technical issues! I vote to jump in.