A comparison of aircraft tire skid with initial wheel rotational speed using ANSYS transient simulation

Based on heavy aircraft main landing gear tires touchdown skidding process, patents have been registered since the 1940s to improve tire safety, decrease the substantial wear and smoke that results from every landing by spinning the rear wheels before touchdown. A single wheel has been modeled as a mass-spring-damper system using ANSYS mechanical transient simulation to analyze static and pre-rotating wheels behavior during a short period between touchdown and skidding, to spin-up to reach the equivalent of the aircraft ground speed. In this paper, a case study is presented of a Boeing 747-400 main landing gear wheel to compare the skidding distance and time between initially static and pre-spun wheels.