Aircraft tire temperature at touchdown with wheel prerotation

Because of the skidding process that occurs when a heavy aircraft’s main landing gear tires touchdown, since the 1940s, a number of ideas have been patented to improve tire safety and decrease the substantial wear and smoke during every landing by spinning the gear wheels before touchdown. In this paper, a coupled structural–thermal transient analysis in ANSYS has been used to model a single wheel main landing gear as a mass-spring system. This model has been chosen to analyze the wheel’s dynamic behavior and tire tread temperature during the short period from static to a matching free-rolling velocity in which the wheel is forced to accelerate by the friction between the tire and ground. The tire contact surface temperature has been calculated for both the initially static and prespun wheels in order to compare the temperature levels for different initial rotations and to validate the use of the prespinning technique.