Research on Vehicle Vibration Fatigue Damage Potential under Non-Gaussian Road Profile Excitation

The amplitude modulation method was used to generate a non-Gaussian road profile with prescribed power spectral density (PSD) and kurtosis. The vehicle vibration fatigue damage potential has been proven to be closely related to the amplitude modulation signal (AMS) and kurtosis of vehicle response. In this paper, the iterative method of AMS modelling based on absolute standard Gaussian distribution is first reviewed. To address the long iteration time problem, a closed-form formulation is presented to construct the AMS directly. Furthermore, by proving that the vehicle response under a slowly varying non-Gaussian road profile excitation can be regarded as the product of the same AMS and vehicle response under a Gaussian road profile excitation with the same PSD, the theoretical relationship between fatigue damage spectrum (FDS) of vehicle response under non-Gaussian and corresponding Gaussian road profiles is formulated based on the AMS. A case study is used to verify the proposed approach. The results show that a wide range of specified kurtosis of road profile can be achieved and the kurtosis of vehicle response is the same as for the road profile. Given kurtosis and fatigue exponent, the extra fatigue damage caused by non-Gaussian road profile can be derived easily from the corresponding Gaussian road profile without calculating the vehicle response, which lays the foundation for a significantly simplified and more accurate fatigue test of vehicle vibration under non-Gaussian road profile.