Airplane Tire Burst Plume Analysis

On rare occasion, aircraft tires have burst in flight after being retracted into the wheel well. The burst rapidly releases a high-pressure plume of gas that may cause damage to systems and structure mounted in the wheel well. Since airplanes must be designed to maintain continued safe flight and landing following a tire burst in the wheel well, it is essential that accurate definitions of the plume pressure loads be provided to the airplane structural and systems designers. Existing plume load definitions have been developed over the years from test data and theoretical calculations, but given the very short duration of the event and the complexity of the dynamics involved, it is desired to validate the existing threat definitions through the use of advanced finite element modeling. This paper describes the use of LS-DYNA to accurately predict the pressure plume created from the controlled release of a pressurized tank. This task is considered part of the validation phase. The next step will include the complexities of the deforming tire to quantify the effect of the rapidly changing hole diameter, and to study how the solution diverges from the classical prediction.