Use of Accumulated Damage Methods in the Development and Validation of an Elastomeric Isolator Bench Test

During elastomeric engine or suspension isolator development, evaluation of durability by physical testing is critical. New designs and tooling must be validated before release by repeated qualification to a durability duty cycle. In many cases this testing must be repeated after minor design or tooling changes. It is highly desirable to use vehicle road testing to validate the isolators. This method is time consuming and expensive, especially when a statistically valid number of isolators must be tested. In the past validation has been accelerated by reducing to cyclic bench testing between peak loads, which is difficult to correlate to vehicle testing or mileage. This paper discusses an accumulated damage FEA method and its application to validate accelerated bench test inputs developed from road test data.