In automotive design space, door opening durability is one of the important design attribute to build a door structure. Customer often interact with door while ingress and egress a vehicle and that builds a perception of vehicle in customer’s mind. Now days, Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) is used extensively to simulate the real time door opening and closing event for designing the door structure for durability performance. Early prediction of durability performance and developing the countermeasures saves great amount of time and cost.
This paper provides a brief study of detail checkstrap mechanism and its influence on door durability performance. Door checkstrap plays an important role in swing door design, it assists the door opening and closing with the help of check arm profile guided by roller and spring. This allows the load transferred from door to body through checkstrap first and then through hinges. The load interval between door full open to door over-open becomes critical for door durability performance. During this event, the majority of energy absorbed by the checkstrap mechanism and attached door & body components. Hence, the checkstrap mechanism representation is very important for the door durability simulation.
Door dynamic analysis for overopen load is performed in LSDYNA solver and fatigue analysis is performed in nCode.