Title: Robust design of the lift-gate opening/closing efforts

Authors: Raviraj Nayak, Kee H. Im, Chun-Liang Lin, Pravin Kapadnis

Addresses: North America Engineering, General Motors Corporation, Warren, MI, USA. ' North America Engineering, General Motors Corporation, Warren, MI, USA. ' North America Engineering, General Motors Corporation, Warren, MI, USA. ' North America Engineering, General Motors Corporation, Warren, MI, USA

Abstract: The opening and closing efforts of the lift-gate system are important aspects of lift-gate design, and contribute towards customer perception of quality. A typical lift-gate system has a pair of pressurised gas struts, to control the motion of the lift-gate. Specification of the gas strut is very critical, since it directly affects the opening/closing effort requirement. Variation of the ambient temperature causes a variation in the gas-strut pressure. Minimising the effect of the gas strut pressure variation on the opening/closing efforts is the goal for robust design of the lift-gate system. In this paper we discuss a robust design method that makes the opening/closing efforts relatively insensitive to the temperature variation. Axiomatic design is employed to study the lift-gate design, in terms of its functional requirements (FR) and its design parameters (DP). The lift-gate system is simulated using ADAMS1 software used for analysis of multi-body systems. Taguchi|s method of orthogonal arrays and signal-to-noise ratio is used for robust design.

Keywords: axiomatic design; functional requirements; gas strut; lift gate system; orthogonal arrays; robust design; signal to noise ratio; Taguchi methods; design parameters; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMPT.2002.005463

International Journal of Materials and Product Technology, 2002 Vol.17 No.5/6, pp.368 - 374

Published online: 11 Oct 2004 *

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