Practice of Shock‐Absorber Design: Steps in the Design of an Oleo‐Pneumatic Undercarriage Leg Available to Purchase

IN a previous article (Ref. 1) the present author outlined some fundamental considerations of general practice. In the present paper the intention is, in effect, to take some pages from a designer's notebook and explain in detail the procedure by which the dynamic characteristics of a leg are determined. A description of one of the author's own designs will provide a suitable area of reference, and although certain of the geometrical calculations will apply rather specially to this, the remainder of the working will be quite general in its application. In particular, the orifice calculations—a vitally useful aspect which has not previously been treated in a practical fashion—have been compared with drop‐test results over a range of differing designs and sizes of shock‐absorber and show very good agreement with them; certainly good enough for a close initial approximation, and in the style of leg described here and in other simple fixed orifice designs, sufficiently accurate to allow of dispensing with dynamic tests provided that tyre and oleo relationships do not diverge too far from the conventional.