Finite Element Modeling of Aircraft Gear Interaction with Cement Concrete Pavement

Computational mechanics applied to dynamic impact/interaction problems is nowadays possible. This approach can be used to Jet the gear and pavement interact in a more complex and realistic way; the FE analysis evaluates either the contact forces and the stresses on the pavement and aircraft gear. This paper describes the development of a 30 Finite Element Model of a cement concrete pavement/joint system and an Airbus 300 gear. The code used to perform all the analysis was LS-DYNA v.950d, a nonlinear explicit Finite Element Analysis code. In order to examine the effects of the joint bump height and aircraft speed, two different pavement models were used, with and without dowels, running a total of 16+16 simulations (4 different speeds, 4 different bump heights for each model). The doweled joint model has been used to evaluate the joint Load Transfer Efficiency, the non-doweled model results have been compared to the values calculated using the Westergaard's theory.