Latching Effort Predictions and its Design Characteristics Studies on Automotive Rear Seat

Automotive Rear Seats are designed as foldable seats to provide more luggage space to customers when the seat is unoccupied. Foldable seats are of two types, Free Standing Seats and High Latch Seats. Free standing seats are designed with recliner mechanism which allows the seat back to rotate and lock at any given position. High Latch Seats are designed with latches operated by CAMs & Springs which locks with striker wire mounted on the body or side pillars. Recliner Mechanism on free standing seat helps to rotate and lock the seat back at any position with ease. But high latch seats require higher efforts to push the seats towards the striker wire to lock. Efforts (Force in N) required to latch the seats with striker wire need to be in the operating range of customers to latch it easily. Hence latching effort calculations and study of design factors which influence the latching efforts get more importance to avoid any customer complaints at later stage. In this paper, a foldable Rear Bench Seat on a pickup truck is considered for evaluating the Latching Effort and its design characteristics. Latching CAMs, Striker Wire, Rear Body Panel, Rubber Bumps and Body Panel Trims are studied in detail to understand their influence on the Latching Effort with the help of CAE.