Concept of Accelerated Durability Evaluation in Vehicle Development 990043

The duration for the development of a new vehicle model is continuously decreasing. This does not permit adequate time for proving component assemblies and vehicles to be evaluated for durability by conventional measures. However, increasing competition and quality consciousness calls for an assured life with a high degree of confidence. This has forced the test engineers to look for techniques for accelerating the durability evaluation. The technique calls for concepts for compressing the evaluation time. This can be achieved by compression in both time as well as frequency domain. Further, it also calls for correct techniques for the mixing of roads, extrapolation of data acquired over a small distance to the vehicle life, evaluation and elimination of non or less damaging inputs, etc.

This paper reviews some of the existing techniques and describes case studies of how accelerated testing can be applied in vehicle development.