Event Isolation Methodology for Structural Fatigue Damage Analysis of Class 8 Tractors

This paper describes a methodology that has been developed to apply basic concepts of pattern recognition to isolate “events” in any type of time history data. The results obtained from this methodology can be used for a variety of engineering applications. In this study, it has been applied to estimate and compare the cumulative structural fatigue damage from single bump excitations versus resonance in Class 8 tractors based on consumer highway data.

Using the basic concepts of pattern recognition, which include statistical methods based on correlation functions, windowing techniques and root mean square values, a similarity search has been performed to extract and classify known consequential time history traces (events) from the set of acquired data. The advantage of this model is seen in extracting events whose exact time traces are not known.