By William Shust Engineering Analyst Navistar Technical Center Fort Wayne, Indiana Designing meaningful tests in the heavy truck industry is more complex than in many other industries because of the wide ranges of uses which trucks meet.
Different customers use one truck model for many different needs.
Since good fuel economy is a prime goal of all our customers, over-design of each model line is a real risk. This portable 8-channel data acquisition and reduction device that ran on a DEC PDP computer. This system had a rainflow counting algorithm hard-coded into it. After thousands of hours of use, the system hardware deteriorated and reliability became a major problem. A new unit would have to rainflow analyze 500 data points per second on each of 8 channels.