Dynamical Behaviours of the Nose Landing Gear with Freeplay and Stochastic Disturbance

Shimmy dynamics of a dual wheel nose landing gear system with torsional freeplay under stochastic lateral disturbances is studied. Dynamic characteristics of the deterministic case are numerically analyzed, especially the shimmy of the landing gear through bifurcation analysis. Meanwhile, the influences of the freeplay nonlinearity on shimmy behaviours are examined in detail. Impacts of stochastic lateral disturbances on the shimmy of the landing gear system are performed via time history and recurrence plots. Our results show that the interaction between the freeplay nonlinearity and the random load induces a significant reduction in the critical shimmy velocity, which has an adverse impact on the stability of the nose landing gear of an aircraft.