OPTIMAL SIZING AND STACKING SEQUENCE OF COMPOSITE SKID LANDING GEAR OF A HELICOPTER

In this paper, the design and optimization of skid landing gear for landing performance and gear strength. The composite skid landing gear is designed to replace usual aluminium 7075 skid landing gear using Kelvar49 epoxy, High modulus (HM) carbon/epoxy and AS4/8552 epoxy composites. A formulation and solution technique using a particle swarm algorithm (PSA) for design optimization of composite skid landing gear is obtainable. The reason of using PSA is to optimize and weight minimization of skid landing gear by considering the constraints such as angle of orientation, ply stacking sequence and ply thickness, taking aluminium alloy 7075 as base metal. The weight savings of the both composite skid landing gear have been calculated.