Road Simulators used to carry out accelerated structural durability validation of a vehicle. As a commercial vehicle manufacturer, for our commercial vehicles structural validation, we are using 8 poster road simulators. We use road load data, torture track data, synthetic profiles or events as the input test data.
From a mini 4 wheeler trucks to high capacity 8 wheeler truck, and any bus variant is being tested at road simulator. All the vehicle variants are tested with prescribed road and load conditions for the pre-determined life. Each wheel of the vehicle is positioned on the wheel pan of the hydraulic actuators so that each actuator excites the corresponding vibration data. The vehicle is being restrained as per the manufacturers recommendation.
Manufacturer recommendations widely addresses the risks associated with the test rigs. In addition to that there are risks associated with the vehicle running, vehicle handling, vehicle positioning. For example, when durability test running when EB power goes off, the vehicle will move down rapidly affects test vehicle as well as test system, when any of the restraint fails, the vehicle wheel dislocates from its position and fall off from test rig can cause heavy damage. Very few OEM’s use heavy vehicle road simulators. Hence the safety related information is very limited. We have identified many areas of road simulator operation in which the safety of the human, test vehicle and test rig is concerned and we have implemented the tailor made solutions for the safer structural validation at road simulator. To name a few, modular vehicle platform for drive on vehicle, primary and secondary restraints, steering locks, hydraulic whip lockings (HWL), wireless E stops, Auto power off test halt system (APOTS), auto pit entry locking systems, Break wire test halt system (BWTHS) ,Wireless wheel slip detection system (WDS) etc,. We take this opportunity to share few of the safety implementations which we made in our Road Simulator Test system of Ashokleyland technical center, so that the learnings can be utilized and implemented where required as a horizontal deployment.