Assessment of Automobile Door Slam using Finite Element Method

Abstract

Automotive cars have various types of doors. The swinging door is the most common & complicated parts because they are doing both functions, general guidelines of car style, & passenger's safety by protecting humans from side crashes. With the advent of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE), Finite Element Analysis (FEA) has become a necessity for the automotive industry to improve and validate all manner of automotive structures. The use of FEA in the design procedure has increased significantly making validation of the FE Models used is essential. A comparison with experimental results of Door slam testing is a very effective method to evaluate the accuracy of the FE Models used. The objective of the door slam testing is to determine acceleration, stress, strains & buckling energy induced while slamming action. In this door slam analysis carried out using CAE tools, Hypermesh-v12, Ls-Dyna. Door is slammed on rigid surface at velocity 1m/sec from opening angle 20 degree and results are evaluated for 0.35 seconds in the time step of 0.01second.Then predictability of the CAE method is examined through detailed comparison of experimental acceleration and strain results. While these results shows excellent agreement in CAE and test for accelerations on the outer panel. Also CAE predicts higher strains on the inner panel than the test. In addition, elastically buckling of outer panel is examined. These results of Acceleration, strain and buckling are also discussed in detail.