High-speed stochastic fatigue testing

Good stochastic fatigue tests are difficult to perform. One of the major reasons is that ordinary servohydraulic loading systems realize the prescribed load history accurately at very low testing speeds only. If the speeds used for constant amplitude testing are applied to stochastic fatigue testing, quite unacceptable errors are introduced. Usually this problem is solved by running the tests at very low speeds and by editing the load history in order to reduce the duration of the test. In this paper a new method for control of stochastic fatigue tests is proposed. It is based on letting the analog control device remain as the basic control mechanism in the system, but distorting the input signal by computer in order to minimize the errors of the load history extremes. The principle proves to be very efficient to reduce all kinds of system errors and has shown to be able to increase the allowable speed by a factor from 10 to 30.