Brakes are one of the most important safety systems in moving vehicles and machines. In vehicles such as cars or motorcycles brakes are used for stopping, controlling speed, and sometimes changing direction of travel. In aircraft, the main function of brakes is to reduce landing speed. As landing is one of the most dangerous maneuvers in aircraft operation, brakes must be efficient and reliable in order to ensure safety of the crew, passengers, and cargo. The most efficient brakes nowadays are friction brakes where velocity is controlled by friction of a pair of specially designed materials, which ensure stable and high friction coefficient over the course of the required braking process. The process itself is the dissipation of energy during aircraft movement which generates very high temperatures in friction materials during the time of the braking process. The materials and the whole brakes have to be temperature resistant, and we must ensure braking parameters are stable during the whole process. The same principle relates to the endurance/fatigue of the brake assemblies which must be durable enough to survive as high number of braking cycles as possible without any failure, which can result in fatal consequences. Every friction pair and every newly designed brake assembly must be laboratory tested for efficiency and endurance/fatigue in order to be used in an aircraft or vehicle. In this paper, we present the basic set of laboratory tests in the scope of friction materials and brake assemblies. Results of the tests are used as confirmations/proofs of proper and safe operation of the brakes for use in vehicles, especially in aircraft but also in land-based vehicles.
Landing gears are one of the main components of an aircraft. The landing gear is used not only during take-off and landing but also, in most cases, during ground manoeuvres. Due to its function, the landing gear is also one of the key safety components of the aircraft due to dissipating landing loads acting on the aircraft. The mentioned loads come from both the vertical and horizontal speeds during touchdown and by the aircraft’s losing the speed by braking. The landing gear is then loaded with constantly changing forces acting in various directions during every landing, with the only difference coming from their magnitude. The repeatable loading conditions cause significant wear of the landing gear. This wear can be divided into two categories, one is the wear of consumable parts such as the brake linings and the other is the fatigue wear of the structural components. The latter type of wear is much more dangerous due to its slow, and in many cases, unnoticeable progression. Fatigue wear can be estimated by numerical analyses - this method works with a great degree of probability on single components but due to the complexity of the landing gear as a whole it is not precise enough to be applied to the full structure. In order to evaluate the fatigue of the whole landing gear the best method accepted by regulations is the laboratory testing method. It involves a series of various drop tests resembling the real landing condition distribution. The aim of the tests is to check the fatigue wear of the landing gear and to prove its reliability for certification and/or operational purposes. In this paper the author describes the basics of the landing gear fatigue wear, possibilities of its evaluation and presents laboratory dynamic method used for extensive tests in life-like operation conditions.
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