Vehicle Door Cutline Determination with Mathematical Modelling on CATIA V5

Door shut-line definition is the first vital step in car body door engineering and depends on the hinge position, hinge shape, manufacturing capabilities and other parameters. In the design process, once the hinge axis definition is finalized door shut-line is defined which should satisfy two major requirements. The requirements are clearance between the door outer surface with its surrounding components (like hinges, fender, other door etc.) and assembly feasibility. Another one is the manufacturability of the proposed design. The above conditions must be checked on different locations of the door as well as w.r.t different openings of the door. The paper presents a mathematical model to determine the door shut-line position with great computational efficiency. This method propounds closure engineer with parameters to define the shut line rather than going for cumbersome manual iterative process. Instead of following an iterative approach to determine a limit for the shut-line, paper presents a mathematical formulation with an implicit equation. An innovative approach to solve implicit equation on CATIA is also discussed which significantly reduces the processing time. This paper inherently discusses a series of challenges which a user faces while determining the door shut-line and provides feasible solutions for those problems.