A methodology for test time reduction in rubber part testing

A reduction of test time can be achieved with the so-called rainflow filtering. Rainflow filtering is a method based on rainflow counting, which removes not damage-relevant load cycles in stochastic signals. This means that an omission takes place and thus the length of the signal is reduced by nearly maintaining its total damage cause. When accepting a larger change in the damage of a signal one can reduce it up to more than 95% of its original length. Here parts of the damage will be shifted from lower to higher amplitudes. So more damage is caused within each cycle and the total number of cycles to failure is smaller. When testing with multi-axial signals it is important to maintain the phase correlations of the axes in order not to change the load conditions. The presented method is able to work with multiaxial signals. Finally some test results are presented, which confirm the applicability of this method for rubber parts.