The computer-aided material selection of aircraft components and design using topology optimization

The primary motivation of this thesis is to make existent better. The existent here means cost, natural conditions and safe zone. Through the study, all activities basically aimed at making those upgrade to a higher level than they already are. An improvement study which brings down the cost, pays regard to nature considering consumption, ensuring the safety of design considering its structural attributes, has been targeted and the scope of study has been created accordingly. In the improvement study, the aviation industry has been opted for. Upper torque arm of main landing gear (MLG) of a large-scale aircraft has been addressed. The extreme loads on MLG have been found and then, the loads on torque arms have been calculated. In the aviation field, safe and lightweight designs take place in priority targets. Considering costliness of aircraft fuel and responsibilities regarding greenhouse gases emissions issue pushed by international boards to the industry, the necessity of improvement of components is unarguable. Improvement objectives that might conflict with each other of torque arm to be improved have been tackled by employing TRIZ. The next chapters have been addressed by the contribution of creative principles presenting by it. Afterwards, with the aim of the designation of material, it's gotten to the phase of the material selection procedure which is Ashby method-oriented. The approach of weighting of material attributes and decision-making stages got integrated to Ashby method. Performance indexes of listed candidate materials have been compared to each other in the quantitative context. Through computer-aided material selection, as a software, CES Edupack (2013) has been employed. By the method applied, forged alloy Aluminium 7475 T7351 material has been selected. Upper torque arm has been modelled using Solidworks (SW). Static analysis has been implemented using SW, ANSYS Workbench, HyperWorks and sT Inspire. Likewise, these were used for performing topology optimization process, as well. Subsequent to redesign, verification analysis got carried out using SW and sT Inspire. Finally, the weight of component was reduced in the ratio of %22,95 and %41,8 respectively. The followed methodology throughout this thesis can be applied to almost all systems and components. By this way, it's possible to make a major contribution to sustainability. The thesis regards the upper torque arm as a case component respecting applicability of the method followed.