Accelerated Life Test to Predict Fatigue Life of Small Manual Steering Gearbox

The objective of this paper is to give an overview of the validation process of a small manual steering gearbox based on the customer usage profile and its correlation using accelerated laboratory tests. Presently, the laboratory validation of the steering gearbox takes at least 3 months and vehicle level validation involves costly resources and a large amount of time. However, fast track automotive development demands shorter validation time. In view of the above, the validation of a small manual steering gearbox was carried out using an unconventional accelerated test. The accelerated test was conducted in the laboratory based on the most damaging cycle derived from the customer-usage profile-based selected torture track cycle tests on vehicle. One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) analysis method was used to select the superior design based on the accelerated test results. However, the selection of the steering gear box was also based on cost and metallurgical characteristics.