Abstract
Because of their technical advantages over ordinary metal springs, gas springs find usage in wide range of applications from furniture to aerospace industry as lifting, lowering or damping assists. Their integration to the tailgate operations in automotive industry is a challenging area, where not only the fundamental gas spring characteristics but also the mounting settings, working environment and tailgate body structure should be considered. The design and integration of these components will determine manual force exertion of operators thus the consideration of ergonomic characteristics of different populations is crucial. This paper introduces a recent visual academic software package, entitled TEM-SOFT, which is developed as a part of this research to perform ergo-mechanic simulations of tailgate operations with a fast, reliable and contemporary engineering approach and it is suitable for engineers and under-post graduate level students of mechanical and industrial engineering programs in the universities. The software developed and presented in this paper features all aspects of tailgate-gas spring operations considering the assembly scheme, tailgate mass center, gas spring type and working temperature in order to compute the required manual forces and the individual and combined impacts of acting parameters. Sufficient amount of scenarios were considered and the results were evaluated and discussed extensively. In addition to the other key findings, conducted research has shown that stronger gas springs, more effectively tend to move the critical tailgate position angle—where no operator force is needed to keep the tailgate opening—to the initial phases of the opening operation. A trade-off of this benefit is a superior initial manual force during closing.
Highlights
The terms design, analysis, sensitivity, rapidity and cost raise the stress on automotive engineers in today’s global industrial challenge
This paper introduces a recent visual academic software package, entitled TEM-SOFT, which is developed as a part of this research to perform ergo-mechanic simulations of tailgate operations with a fast, reliable and contemporary engineering approach and it is suitable for engineers and under-post graduate level students of mechanical and industrial engineering programs in the universities
It is aimed to work on the influences of gas spring type and the temperature conditions on the overall operational characteristics of the tailgate operation; the gas spring nominal force and the working temperature are assigned the values of force of the gas spring (Fgs-n) = 100, 150, 200 N and T = −10 ̊C, 20 ̊C, 50 ̊C respectively
Summary
The terms design, analysis, sensitivity, rapidity and cost raise the stress on automotive engineers in today’s global industrial challenge. Researchers implemented virtual reality for the evaluation of car interiors and seating position of the driver For their ergonomic assessments, digital human models were formed representing American male population in a semi-immersive virtual environment. A hierarchical controller framework was developed by Mårdberg et al [20] for manikin motion planning aimed to reduce the time needed to perform virtual ergonomic assessments of manual assembly sequences They realized and tested a general whole-body path planner in a virtual car manufacturing plant, which ensures collision-free and ergonomically sound motions that accomplish the assembly tasks. The above defined past scientific investigations clearly identified the simultaneous presence of the issues related to force, ergonomics and automotive design based on human factors, and formally denoted the broad industrial fields where the gas springs are employed with specific expectations. In the present software-age, the outlined specifications are unique to TEM-SOFT, which clearly identifies its novel contribution to both academic purposes and industrial applications
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