Water sprays produced by aircraft tyres running in contaminated runway

The sprays produced by aircraft tyres running in water or snowmelt may affect the running performance and the safety of flights. Therefore, test for the sprays caused by the runway water is an important subject for the flight certification of an aircraft. In this paper, the process of sprays conduction is simulated by finite element software LS-DYNA, in which the water on the runway is simulated by smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. Based on a specific tyre, engineering method is employed to study the water spray response, then numerical analysis model is founded. Results of both methods indicate that there is a critical aircraft ground speed, below which the side-spray elevation angle increases, while above which the side-spray elevation angle decreases with the increase of aircraft ground speed. In addition, the way to calculate the amount of water in different positions is given in the numerical method, the result of which also shows that tyre chine has a significant effect on the spray response under some circumstances.