Fatigue reliability of cars under road-induced cyclostationary excitation

This paper has two goals: (a) describe a method for modelling special types of nonstationary loads on cars, called cyclostationary loads, and (b) demonstrate the importance of this method. Cyclostationary excitations are encountered in many real-life problems involving systems subjected to periodic, random loads. Using a two-degree-of-freedom model of a car travelling on a road made of slabs, the paper demonstrates that the proposed model estimates the statistics of the vehicle response and the fatigue life of its components more accurately than a traditional stationary model.