Accelerated fatigue testing on special tracks as new part of methodology for bus/trolleybus development

Abstract Over the last twenty years, the Research and Testing Institute in Pilsen (former SKODA Research Company) has been developing a methodology of computational and experimental investigation of strength and fatigue life of bodies of road vehicles for mass passenger transport. The methodology includes multibody dynamic simulations, FE stress analysis, test bench testing, stress measurement during the service of the prototype vehicle, evaluation of data and fatigue life calculations. There is a bus manufacturer which plans to include accelerated fatigue testing on special proving grounds into this procedure. In real urban traffic and on the test circuit, extensive stress measurements on a number of structural details and components have been carried out and analysed. In collaboration with the Regional Technological Institute, which is the research centre of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of West Bohemia, fatigue life was calculated for critical structural details and components of various parts of the bus. Based on these calculations, the development potential was assessed and planning of accelerated tests on proving grounds was considered. This paper is an expanded version of the contribution published at the 3nd International Conference on Structural Integrity, ICSI 2019, 2-5 September 2019, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal [1] .