Aircraft Tire Contact Patch Force and Shear Sensor

Aircraft tires experience extreme forces during landing. Since a failure can result in loss of personnel and equipment, the health of aircraft tires is carefully monitored. Currently inspection is done by various methods of manual inspection. This is labor intensive and can only detect certain types of failure. The Air Force needs a system that can quantify the normal and shear forces across the entire contact patch to assess where the tire is currently within its life cycle. This system is also of great interest for tire development. Currently no system exists for dynamic evaluation of shear forces in a tire. Luna has partnered with a large tire manufacturer to insure a rapid transition to market. Luna will apply its high density fiber optic strain sensing technology to a sensing mat that can resolve and isolate both normal and shear loading in the tire contact patch. Luna wil work with commercial partners and the Air Force to test the system and work towards a smooth transition to the fleet. BENEFIT: Using Luna''s proposed tire patch sensing system the Air Force can create stress maps of the entire tire before or after every flight. These foot print stress signatures can be used to track the wear rate of the tire over its life and predict when replacement is required. By making an automatic replacement decision based on measurement data, inspection and maintenance labor is kept to a minimum and tire life is maximized. The system also has a huge potential in tire research and development. Tire manufacturers have little to no information about the behavior of dynamic tire patch load distribution. Having a tool that supplies this information would allow manufacturers to develop higher performance, longer lasting tires.