Experimental Design and Validation of an Accelerated Random Vibration Fatigue Testing Methodology

Novel accelerated random vibration fatigue test methodology and strategy are proposed, which can generate a design of the experimental test plan significantly reducing the test time and the sample size. Based on theoretical analysis and fatigue damage model, several groups of random vibration fatigue tests were designed and conducted with the aim of investigating effects of both Gaussian and non-Gaussian random excitation on the vibration fatigue. First, stress responses at a weak point of a notched specimen structure were measured under different base random excitations. According to the measured stress responses, the structural fatigue lives corresponding to the different vibrational excitations were predicted by using the WAFO simulation technique. Second, a couple of destructive vibration fatigue tests were carried out to validate the accuracy of the WAFO fatigue life prediction method. After applying the proposed experimental and numerical simulation methods, various factors that affect the vibration fatigue life of structures were systematically studied, including root mean squares of acceleration, power spectral density, power spectral bandwidth, and kurtosis. The feasibility of WAFO for non-Gaussian vibration fatigue life prediction and the use of non-Gaussian vibration excitation for accelerated fatigue testing were experimentally verified.