Estimating Vibration-Fatigue-Life on Experimentally Acquired Data

Abstract:

It is a common practice in the automotive industry to expose products to accelerated vibration tests, that simulate the load, predicted to occur during the products service time. To avoid long testing times, higher amplitudes are used. Usually such tests come late in the development process, and can result in unexpected costs. A common tool for predicting time-to-failure or expected fatigue-life of the product is the time-domain method, using the rainflow counting algorithm and the Palmgren-Miner summation method. However, if one chooses to apply this method inside a FEM environment on a large amount of nodes with different time histories dependent on the structure excitation, the time-domain method becomes computationally complex. This has led to more effective methods, that estimate the time-to-failure in frequency-domain but are less accurate, compared to the time-domain approach. In this research, a group of such methods is presented and compared using real signals, namely: Tovo-Benasciutti, Wirsching-Light, Petrucci-Zuccarello, empirical α_0.75, Dirlik and Gao-Moan method. Separately, only some of those methods were already compared side by side. Usually the comparison was made on simulated random signals, while this research compares them based on a real signal, collected by measuring different groups of spectra (e.g. typical vibration test profiles, different background noise levels, spectral width, number of modes etc.). In existing studies, Dirlik is usually identified as most accurate but in this research, conclusions show, that the Tovo-Benasciutti and Zhao-Baker methods can be more accurate than the Dirlik method and should therefore also be considered for vibration fatigue analysis.

• Periodical: Key Engineering Materials (Volumes 569-570)
• Pages: 900-907
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/KEM.569-570.900
• Online since: July 2013
• Authors: Matjaz Mrsnik, Janko Slavič, Miha Boltezar
• Keywords: Random Loading, Structural Dynamics, Vibration Fatigue, Vibration Testing

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