Automotive Duty Cycle

A duty cycle is the reference that sets the requirements for vehicle systems and subsystems. NATC understands that duty cycles of systems and components are critical to our customers’ success in the marketplace.

We have developed and continuously maintain a duty cycle database of terrain, road roughness, and climatic conditions that range from subsets of the North American market to international markets. We evaluate vehicle performance and durability for a wide range of markets with a combination of global experience and formal cooperative agreements with proving grounds in Europe, Asia, Canada, United States, and South Africa.

We have developed many duty cycles that are applicable to vehicle platforms ranging from passenger cars to class 8 over-the-road and specialty heavy-duty vocational trucks such as construction, oil field, and mining equipment.

Whether you are a small organization manufacturing components or a large OEM making full vehicle systems, our engineers will work with you to develop a duty cycle definition. This generally consists of the following scalable steps, which helps inform the requirements that optimize your products.

• Identify the product boundary conditions such as cost point, customer base, warranty, time to market schedule.
• Define how the product will be used, including customer profiles, use cases, road roughness, and climatic conditions for the intended market.
• Correlate the resulting duty cycle to test operations that account for all real-world inputs in a repeatable, controlled testing environment. If desired, measure component performance during operation (road load data acquisition (RLDA)) and apply it to shaker table inputs.
• Use the RLDA information for model validation in the computer simulation environment over the duty cycle. This expedites further product analysis and development by eliminating the significant time and cost expense of repetitive test-fix-test cycles.