The prevention of aircraft tires overheating by pre-rotating the wheels

Abstract

Pre-spinning the wheel is the proposed solution to the elimination of aircraft landing smoke caused by high tire tread temperature during touchdown. In this paper, a case study of the aircraft's main landing gear has been simulated for a single wheel, using a coupled structural - thermal transient analysis in ANSYS to estimate the tire tread temperature for a typical landing and for when wheels are pre-spun, in order to validate the technique of pre-spinning the wheel; and to calculate how much pre-rotation is enough to avoid aircraft landing smoke.