On the synthesis of non-Gaussian road vehicle vibrations

This thesis is primarily concerned with the development of a method for synthesizing, under controlled conditions in the laboratory, the random vibrations generated by road transport vehicles. Common sense indicates that simply replicating the vibrations recorded form a single event will not be sufficient representative of all possible types of vibrations that can occur and will therefore produce a biased outcome.

This study has essentially taken a statistical approach to characterizing these non-stationary, random vibrations and has culminated in the proposal and validation of a practical, yet sophisticated, approach to synthesize no-stationary random vibrations in the laboratory.

The thesis presents the development of a method for characterising the non-stationarity of random vibrations by means of the statistical distribution of the instantaneous magnitude. A two-parameter statistical model based on a combination of Rayleigh and Weibull distributions is shown to offer good agreement with wide range of experimental data. […]