FINDLAY, Ohio—Endurica L.L.C., a characterization and software simulation company that specializes in fatigue testing, has introduced automatic block cycle generation for its patented Endurica CL software.
Specifically, the feature allows customers to conduct "simplified durability testing from multi-channel road loads recorded at a testing track." This track preserves the most important road loads and discards non-critical information, from which users then can design quick fatigue tests to simulate driving condition damage.
"We've seen some suppliers trying to use fatigue codes written for metals to generate their block cycle schedules," said Will Mars, founder and president of Endurica. "It's a questionable approach that fails to account for the significant differences between metallic and rubbery behavior."
Mars said that generating a block cycle schedule the old-fashioned way "involves too much hand-waving and guesswork."
"We often hear frustration with block cycle tests that were generated this way," he said. "Too often, they change the failure mode of the part so that the lab test fails to match the field test. Our method uses critical plane analysis. It takes into account rubber's nonlinear material properties. We've eliminated the guess work."