Modeling and Dynamic Analysis of an Aircraft-Pavement Coupled System

Purpose This paper focuses on the modeling and dynamic analysis of an aircraft-pavement coupled system. The dynamic response of the aircraft-pavement coupled system in different pavement IRIs, soil stiffness coefficients, and damping of aircraft's non-suspension system are studied to provide a potential theoretical guidance for the mechanical properties evaluation of an airport runway. Methods A rigid pavement is abstracted as a finite length Euler-Bernoulli beam on a finite length Pasternak foundation, and a two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) aircraft model which consists of a suspension system (SS) and a non-suspension system (N-SS) is coupled to the abstracted beam model to describe the point-to-point contact of the aircraft tires with the pavement when the aircraft lands and taxies on the pavement. The multi-degree-of-freedom governing differential equations of the coupled system is obtained by the Galerkin treatment of the beam equation. The vibration characteristics of the discrete coupled system under the aircraft lift and the pavement roughness are studied by the suspension system vertical displacement (SSVD), the non-suspension system vertical displacement (N-SSVD), the dynamic load coefficient (DLC), and the pavement vertical displacement (PVD). Numerical analysis has been carried out in detail to detect the law of the coupled system's response by changing the international roughness index (IRI) of the pavement and the N-SS damping. Results and Conclusion The results show that properly increasing the N-SS damping can reduce the numbers and amplitudes of the aircraft's bounce after landing and the aircraft-pavement coupling action has a more significant influence on the pavement dynamics such as DLC and PVD than the uncoupled system for an excellent pavement in hard soil foundation. The coupling action between the aircraft and the pavement should not be ignored for studying the landing and taxiing of an aircraft and the vibration of the pavement.