Temperature elevation of aircraft tyre surface at touchdown with pre-rotations

The runway and landing gear speed difference causes non-negligible friction at touchdown, generating vital heat to raise the tyre tread temperature. The resulting material decomposition reduces tread thickness and significantly impacts flight safety and the environment. Airline operators also need to pay the cost of frequent tyre replacement. The pre-rotation strategy has been proposed to prevent high-speed friction at touchdown. Therefore, a mathematical algorithm is established on MATLAB to simulate the tyre friction and heat generation with various pre-rotation levels. The algorithm is validated by experiments, and a transient thermos-mechanical analysis on ANSYS is used as a reference. The presenting work is one of the few that uses theoretical modelling to simulate tyre heat generation. The formulas presented therein, including Laplace's equation, make the results reliable and traceable. It can be seen that the developed algorithm is capable of calculating the tyre temperature. The pre-rotation can efficiently reduce the friction strength at touchdown. However, when the pre-rotation speed is relatively low, a slight increase in maximum tyre temperature may occur, and the specific reasons for this will be in the discussion.