Mechanical Engineering / Sustainable Energy Session:

Title:            Aircraft in-built parking system using lifting and rotating gear mechanism
Authors:       Prem Kumar P. S., Karthick M., Padmanaban G., Sivanesan M., Vasantharaj C.
Abstract:     There are various sizes of aircrafts with different payload conditions are in use. The aircrafts are long, medium and short sizes; and also enough space is required for parking process of the aircraft. While parking the aircraft, pilot faces more difficulties such as required time for parking, fuel consumption etc. The pilot gets stressed by handling lot of controls to park the aircraft and he needs additional ground team support. The basic requirement for a parking and storage facility are the runway infrastructure, it should be able to accommodate the aircraft in general weather conditions. Parking of the aircraft includes planning, execution of a parking site layout, it’s to provide the short, medium and long term parking of the aircraft with more ease. The spacing between the aircrafts has to be sufficient for easy access and movement. Poor parking procedures result in expensive damages to the aircrafts. These are all some of the difficulties during the aircraft parking procedures. Aircraft equipped with triangle landing gear are generally towed by attaching a bar to the axle of the nose wheel. They may also be towed forward or backward. Our proposed mechanism is expected to minimize these difficulties and make this hard situation into easier ones. This paper addresses a mechanism comprises of a gear and lifting arrangements, sensors, control switches which assists the pilot for ease parking. The lifting mechanism fitted on the landing gear/ fuselage of the aircraft. The whole weight of the aircraft will act on the landing gear/ lifting mechanism. Separate jack is proposed to use in the respective landing gears/ lifting mechanism. When the aircraft is lifted using the lifting mechanism the whole weight will be acting on the mechanism, this lifting mechanism uses ground as support for lifting the aircraft. A push switch can be placed in the cockpit area to lift the aircraft for the required height. A sensor is placed in the lifting mechanism to detect the malfunctioning and ensuring all the mechanism get lifted up simultaneously. When the pilot operates the control switch, the lifting mechanism will take ground as a reference and the aircraft will get lifted. Then the landing gear can be rotated as per the angle required using gear mechanism. In case of triangle landing gear, our proposed mechanism used to rotate nose wheel for required angle and also rotate main wheels. This mechanism will be very helpful during the maintenance & overhaul time to ease the engineer’s effort.

Keywords:   Lifting Mechanism, Gear arrangement, Control system, Sensors, Cam, Landing Gear
Pages:         464-467

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