A Novel Safe Life Extension Method for Aircraft Main Landing Gear Based on Statistical Inference of Test Life Data and Outfield Life Data

Safe life extension work is demanded on an aircraft’s main landing gear (MLG) when the outfield MLG reaches the predetermined safe life. Traditional methods generally require costly and time-consuming fatigue tests, whereas they ignore the outfield data containing abundant life information. Thus, this paper proposes a novel life extension method based on statistical inference of test and outfield life data. In this method, the MLG’s fatigue life is assumed to follow a right-skewed lognormal distribution with an asymmetric probability density function. In addition, the MLG’s new safe life can be inferred through the Bayesian approach in which the test life data and outfield life data are used for prior information acquisition and Bayesian update, respectively. The results indicated that the MLG’s safe life was significantly extended, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. Numerous simulations also demonstrated that the extended safe life can meet the requirements of reliability and confidence and thus is applicable in engineering practice.