Steering Wheel Tie Rod Fatigue Life Determination According to Turkish Mission Profiles

In this study, Turkish customer automobile usage was determined by a questionnaire in order to form the Turkish Mission profile for a LCV (light commercial vehicle). A comparison between Turkish customer usage and a of the European County’s mission profile was done.  Referencing sale percentage of this vehicle and the region of the failures come out on other model vehicles were produced before and also Turkey’s geographic and climate condition, a new test road was formed for this kind of vehicle. In order to determine Turkey’s rods fatigue characteristics a road test executed.   About 50 road routes and some rough road’s fatigue characteristics were acquitted with a LCV (Light Commercial vehicle) equipped with sensors. Collected data were elaborated with a software program such as; spike analysis, frequency analysis, artihmethic manipulation etc.. After that the general load spectrum of Turkey’s roads belong to the steering wheel tie rod is formed. Rain-flow statistical counting method was applied steering wheel tie rod’s signals in order to make fatigue comparisons meaningfully and other application. Then Fatigue analysis of the steering wheel tie rod according to MP (Turkish mission profiles) were calculated by using FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and verified by the Palsmgren-Miner rule.