CAE Method Development for the Seat Latch Effort Calculation in 2 ^nd Row Bench Seats and Optimization

Latches are generally used to lock/unlock a component against each other. In the automotive industry, latches are widely used in doors and seats. Seat latches have to secure the seat safely to the body in the event of a crash and at the same time they have to be locked/unlocked with easy efforts. Seat latches are mostly supplier designed parts. Supplier latch effort calculations involve only latch components. Actual latch effort calculations should be done with seat structures, foams, trims and body environments. Hence OEMs are responsible to provide easily lockable/unlockable seats to their customers. Customers nowadays, are raising complaints regarding latching issues to respective automotive industry which in turn costs more due to after sales services/warranty claims. Therefore, automotive industries must spend a significant amount of time and capital on physical test and method development for calculating the latch efforts. CAE method is the best approach to calculate the latching effort. However, there is no such proven CAE method available for testing seat latch effort (the effort applied by passenger to engage/disengage latching action). CAE method can be developed to correlate with physical test and do design iterations to get an optimum design with good latch effort and cost. In this paper, authors elaborate about a CAE method to calculate the latching effort using LS-dyna solver along with a deep dive on physical test data correlation to verify the design verification effectiveness.