At a time when there is a distinct drive for accelerated sustainability the Flying V is a promising new aircraft configuration with the potential for significantly higher efficiency than the current state-of-the-art. Up until this point the Landing Gear layout has only been investigated at an aircraft-level meaning there is limited knowledge on the systems integration with the surrounding environment. Given that the landing gear is a safety-critical component that makes up to 5\% of the MTOW, the parameters which drive the weights effects must be understood. The aim of this thesis which is to increase the fidelity of the weight estimation of an operationally-feasible main landing gear by maximising the use of physics-based calculations. The model development is performed in collaboration with the Airbus Future Projects Office in Hamburg.

The previous landing gear topology is first refined to address certain complexities in the kinematic design which do not align with typical commercial operations. The refined kinematic significantly reduces size of the lower wing fairing and reduces the added bogie rotation in the previous design. The primary components of mechanism are deemed operationally feasible yet certain components need to be added to validate a full kinematic. The geometry is discretised and a minimisation function is run in order to size the thickness of each tubular element based on selected sizing ground loads. The weight of a single main landing gear is obtained and the structural efficiency is compared to that of known landing gears of state-of-the-art aircraft. Furthermore a sensitivity study was conducted to understand the effect of landing gear length on weight and conclusions drawn on limitations of the tool.

Overall, the new kinematic design proposal is evidence of a potential mechanism that fullfills key design considerations in the scope of the available design space. Furthermore, the physics-based weight estimation provides new data and knowledge for future work on Flying V landing gears.
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Assembly, Integration and Verification (AIV) in space makes launching geosynchronous satellites faster and significantly cheaper in the long term. A space-tug is launched into space to perform AIV there. It assembles a standardised satellite consisting of several modules. The modules are designed in such a way that the required subsystems for a communication satellite are incorporated in the modules. Examples of these modules are a propulsion module, a solar array module and a computer module. Due to the standardised modules, testing time and costs can be reduced significantly. This ensures a delivery time of maximum one year, which is the time from order until operations in space. The modules are efficiently packed and connected to external beams in the launch vehicle, to make sure that two satellites can be launched simultaneously. The external beams take up the extreme loads that occur during launch. This decreases the dry mass of the satellite, as the modules do not need as much structural mass. The subsystem design and structural analysis result in a drymass of 1847 kg per satellite. Next to the two satellites, a refuelling tank is added in the launch vehicle to refuel the tug. The tug requires 2921 kg of fuel to transfer the two satellites and go back to its initial state. Due to the modularity of the satellites, the lifetime of the satellites can be increased. Regarding the economic feasibility of the mission, a full return on investment is expected after 15 years of operations in base case scenario. ... Read more