A Study of Design Methodology to Develop Improved Door System of a Vehicle

In the past few years, technological innovations in the automobile industry took vehicle performance to the next level. One such innovation is frame integrated panel door. This type of door helps automobile companies to have the advantages of both conventional panel and frame type doors. Though it has a good number of advantages, there are some drawbacks too. It requires improvements in its quality, NVH performance, weight and etc. Quality of a door is low due to the limitations in structural design and manufacturing technologies. And it is difficult to have a robust structure which leads to degradation of key performing factors such as NVH. For a lightweight vehicle, it is important to design an optimized structure for saving weight, without compromising its performance. In order to overcome these drawbacks a new optimized design structure is required for door system. This Research paper is about a systematic design methodology for Development of a new optimized door structural design by a comprehensive engineering design analysis of existing design constrains and drawbacks. The design methodology is described as below. Step 1 is the System analysis. The correlation of all components constituting the door was schematized and their functional relationships were modeled to analyze door system. Step 2 is the Problem analysis. The occurrence-sequence mechanism for problems was enumerated and the root cause was analyzed by investigating up to the sub ordinate level components in door system. Step 3 is deriving the concepts. Using the theory of inventive problem solving techniques, new concepts were derived from a variety of parameters such as new structures, materials and manufacturing processes. Step 4 is the Specification optimization. New design is evaluated for possible optimization in its specifications. Based on evaluation result optimal specifications are selected. Step 5 is the performance evaluation. The performance is verified by evaluating the new structure of the system. Following the above design process, a new door system with an initial design objective was developed.