• prognostics for maintenance enhancement
• tire loads model
• tire temperature
• tire wear

This thesis is part of the research activities carried out at the Aerospace Division of Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile ed Industriale dell’Università di Pisa, for the development of the landing/roll-out simulator of a light jet aircraft. The main objective of the simulator is to investigate the potentialities and the limitations of implementing automatic control functions for the directional control of small aircrafts on ground, through the combined use of conventional commands (steering and rudder) and hydraulic differential brakes as stand-by command. The first section of the work is focused on characterisation of failure transients of the fault-tolerant directional control, after a nose wheel steering jamming, before the differential brakes are activated to compensate the fault, with the objective of identifying the requirements for a safe and effective ground directional control. In the second part, a physical-based model for tires’ faults, including heat generation and wear, is developed and implemented in the simulator, in order to estimate the Remaining Useful Life of the component. Finally, a Prognostic Health Management model, that could actually been used in the operative aircraft, is developed and verificated.