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Evaluation of vehicle structural durability is one of the key requirements in design and development of today's automobiles. Computer simulations are used to estimate vehicle durability to save the cost and time required for building and testing the prototype vehicles. The objective of this work was to find the service life of automotive structures like passenger commercial vehicle (bus) and truck's cabin by calculating cumulative fatigue life for operation under actual road conditions. Stresses in the bus and cabin are derived by means of performing finite element analysis using inertia relief method. Multi body dynamics simulation software ADAMS was used to obtain the load history at the bus and cabin mount locations - using measured load data as input. Strain based fatigue life analysis was carried out in MSC-Fatigue using static stresses from Nastran and extracted force histories from ADAMS. The estimated fatigue life was compared with the physical test results.

The objective of this work is to find cumulative fatigue damage of the truck cabin caused by proving ground data. Stresses in the cabin are derived by finite element analysis using inertia relief method. Multi body simulation software ADAMS was used to obtain the load history at cabin attachment points using measured proving ground data as input. The fatigue damage of the truck cabin was estimated by linear super position method with static results and load history. The calculated numerical fatigue damage results were compared with physical test results and correlated.