Main Landing Gear Design for Piper Arrow IV

The main topic of this mechanical engineering design project is to redesign the landing gear of the Piper Arrow IV- PA-28RT-201 Aircraft. The new designed needed to take into account a 66% decrease in aircraft weight respect to the original Piper Arrow. With the decrease weight of the aircraft, the landing gear components must be individually redesigned to accommodate the stress and forces applied. When considering the redesign of each component some of the factors focused on were high strength, safety factor, durability and finally overall cost by reducing the overall weight of the landing gear. One major key in the redesign of the landing gear components was the use of SolidWorks, as stress analysis along with high-cycle fatigue analysis was easily simulated with this program. This software also gave us the ability to change and compare material strength and cost for further simulation without the need of prototyping or testing. Once this was done, I was then able to determine the best alternative in redesigning my landing gear. I decided that the price of the material was an important factor, so I avoided high valued materials and I also wanted to reduce the weight of the landing gear in order to increase the payload. These two important factors were really the backbone of my decisions. I also had to make sure that all of the possible changes that I was going to make met with the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR). This report documents the iterative process and summarizes the challenges in designing a landing gear.Ingeniería Tecnologías Industriale