City Transit Bus Testing

When a large commercial bus manufacturer was experiencing broken frames on its products, Ponderosa Associates was asked to investigate the source of failure.

Engineering crews worked day and night to tear down the buses to the structural components in order to install strain gauges in key areas. Once instrumented, the buses were loaded with ballast and driven through a test course to simulate everyday workloads. Throughout the course, dozens of channels of strain gauge data were recorded in real time and used to calculate the stresses generated in the structure. Weak areas and failure modes became apparent in the stress analysis. These problem spots were then redesigned and tested using finite element analysis (FEA), and a course of action for making structural corrections to the buses was recommended to the manufacturer.