The Design and Analysis of Rudder Hinges of an Aircraft

Abstract

On an aircraft, the Rudder is one of the important directional control surface along with the rudder-like elevator (attached to the vertical stabilizer) and ailerons (attached to the wings) that control pitch and roll, respectively. The rudder is usually attached to the fin (vertical stabilizer) through HINGES which allows the pilot to control yaw about the vertical axis, i.e. change horizontal direction. The components of hinge assembly are hinge Arms, Fork Head, Spar and Panel, hinge Arms are to be designed to take loads from rudder. One end of the hinge arms are attached to Spar (composite) and Panels (Top and Bottom Skin) through fasteners. Other end is connected to Fork head (metallic) through riveting. The scope of the present work is to detailed design of Rudder hinge assembly to meet strength and stability requirements and modelling done by using Unigraphics V10 software. The static stress analysis carried out to find the stresses like Von misses, Maximum Principal, shear stresses for both Metallic and composite materials and also Lug strength check, Linear static analysis, Normal mode analysis, and buckling analysis are covered in the justification of Hinge assembly for the rudder using finite element approach with help of MSC/PATRAN and MSC/NASTRAN software. From the analysis found that maximum von-Misses stress for the critical load is 347MPa is within the allowable yield strength of 350MPa of AL material. The maximum principal stress is 165MPa and is within the allowable ultimate strength of the material 470MPa. Maximum principal stresses for the composite materials (CFRP) are within the allowable limits. FEA of static and hand calculation results are compared and deviation is less than 2%