Analytical and experimental evaluation of a composite leaf spring landing gear

This manuscript dealt with designing, manufacturing and testing of a composite leaf spring for a given light aircraft. First; a new analytical design procedure was used to design an optimum leaf spring for minimum weight and optimal deflection and load factor. The design procedure employed principle of energy conservation together with a commercial finite element software ANSYS to take into account the requirements of the certification specifications for light aircrafts. Unidirectional S-glass/Epoxy composites along with hand-layup and vacuum bagging techniques were used to fabricate the leaf spring. In order to verify analytical results, a fabricated leaf spring was experimentally evaluated by using a homemade drop test fixture equipped with accelerometers. Experimental results that involve accelerations of different parts of the leaf spring are processed in the MATLAB software by using signal processing toolbox. Comparison between results, showed a good agreement between analytical procedure and experimental results which in return verify the applicability and accuracy of developed analytical design procedure.