Accelerated fatigue test for automotive chassis parts design: An overview

Fatigue strength is of prior concern for automotive chassis parts design. In a reliability framework, its assessment still requires long and expensive test campaigns. In particular, high-cycle endurance tests usually involve several specimens undergoing million-cycle procedures. In order to reduce the specimen number (e.g. expensive prototypes) and to shorten testing procedures (i.e. time-to-result delay), Accelerated Life Tests (AFT) are developed under the constraint of the needed high-reliability assessment. These methods do not involve high frequency load cycling, but are mainly based on stress magnification and fatigue damage equivalence. In this paper, at first a review of the fatigue test procedures currently used in the automotive industry (e.g. StrairCase, Locati and StairCase-Locati) is addressed. Thus, numerical simulations are used in order to assess the efficiency of these test procedures and compare their performances.