Ensuring Life of Radiator Fans by Determining Fatigue Life Through Strain Analysis

This analysis is an attempt to identify the life of a centrifugal fan based on the strains it experiences during operation in a typical generator set radiator cooling application.

Before testing gets underway, finite element analysis (FEA) is normally used to identify high stress locations. These areas are instrumented with strain gauges. Testing is conducted at a wide range of fan speeds and different operating condition using slip ring and SoMat eDAQ for data collection. A typical test would have data collected up to 4GB. A multitude of nCode Glyphworks signal processing techniques starting with drift detection, spike detection, filtering tools are used to make sure that data is reliable and in a usable stage for further post processing. Frequency domain tools like frequency spectrums, waterfall, joint frequency and order tracking techniques are used to determine dynamics of the system. The data is further used for fatigue analysis using strain life and/or stress life glyphs which determines the fatigue life of radiator cooling fans in the application.

Presenter: Tejas N.Chothani, Cummins Power Generation Originally presented on March 4, 2015 at the 2015 HBM-nCode Products User Group Meeting in Livonia, Michigan (USA).