A technique for developing a high accuracy durability test for a Light Truck on a Six Degree-of-Freedom Road Test Simulator

A technique for developing a high accuracy laboratory durability test for a light-duty pickup truck on an MTS Six Degree-of-Freedom Light Truck (LT) Road Test Simulator (RTS) is presented. On the vehicle being studied, various transducers were instrumented. On-road data was acquired for drive file development on a RTS. Vehicle transducer responses from the road were used as targets to be achieved on the simulator. Several simulation schemes using different vehicle transducer configurations as control channels were attempted and the correlation of transducer responses between those achieved on the simulator and the on-road data was analysed. The configuration that produced the best correlation with on-road responses was adopted to develop the drive files used for subsequent vehicle durability testing.