Loads Cascading for Full Vehicle Component Design

Frequency domain methods of analysis are now being used for the evaluation of fatigue for large vehicle systems and these methods offer advantages over equivalent time domain approaches in a number of ways, including analysis efficiency and the usefulness of derived results. One big potential advantage is to be able to do localized sub-component analysis using “cascaded” loads. Such sub-components can be analysed with refined parameters such as more sophisticated damping or a different frequency range. Local parts can also be re-analysed at a different phase in the design program. This paper will demonstrate the approach and show examples of the method.