Random vibration testing as used today is largely unchanged in technique since it was introduced in the early 1950s. It attempts to capture the essence of the service vibration environment for a product and reproduce a similar environment in the test lab. It does this by summarizing the test environment using a frequency spectrum, which gives the relative weighting of each frequency band, and an averaged overall signal intensity. The frequency spectrum is typically defined as an acceleration power spectral density (PSD), and the overall signal intensity is defined as a root-mean-squared (RMS) averaged acceleration. The primary advantage of random vibration testing is that it produces a waveform similar in appearance to those actually measured in the field.
However, despite the similarity of random test and environmental waveforms, it is increasingly being recognized that current random test specifications do not capture the field vibration environment with sufficient intensity for many tests. For example, in the automotive world, technicians often see that random tests do not find product faults that should show up when vibration testing. To make random testing more effective, they sometimes take the random spectrum, and increase the intensity level according to their own internal, home-cooked formula. The intensity level may be increased so the random peak g levels match the real world.
Another method to rectify this situation is to use a Field Data Replication (FDR) technique, where the actual waveform measured in the field is reproduced on a shaker in the lab. This method can be extremely useful for many tests. However, critics of this technique claim that since the waveform produced in the test is always the same as one field measurement, it doesn’t capture the variability which can actually occur in the field. For example, each lap around the track will produce a different vibration waveform, so simply recording a single lap and repeating that lap many times on your shaker removes the variability. Also, the large amount of data involved makes it difficult to define a standard, and makes it difficult to define pass/fail criteria for the test. Because of this, there are still very few test specifications based on FDR techniques.
What, in summary, is the problem with current random techniques? Experience suggests very strongly that the problem is the inability to reproduce the peak accelerations which occur in actual use of a product. The solution to this problem lies in adding a third control parameter to the vibration tests. Presently, current random techniques are controlled by two parameters – one which controls the frequency content of the PSD spectrum and a second which controls the overall test amplitude (the RMS values). By adding a third control parameter – a kurtosis control parameter – one could control the amount of time the random vibration test runs at higher RMS values. This would provide the desired peak accelerations which cause the real-life product failures that are presently being missed by the current random vibration techniques.