Optimized Panel Design for Reducing Seal Squeak and Chucking in Door & Body Seals

Quieter cabins in an automobile are the new era, they provide customers with pleasurable driving experience. Squeak and Rattle are spoil sport for any OEM that aim to improvise customer driving experience. Their nonlinear nature makes it difficult to formulate design frontloading methods. The issue of seals rubbing against the body & door interface is a clear sign of seal squeak & seal chucking. Seals are applied with anti-friction coatings to avoid stick slip phenomena between EPDM and painted panel. Primary root cause for seal squeak is coating erosion. The challenge lies in determining whether the body or the closure side contributes to the seal issue. This paper presents a distinctive approach for identifying the seal squeaking noise and enriches on the new modelling methods for seal interaction with door and body interfaces using FE software. The proposed method was able to highlight the locations along the door-body interface for squeak noise. The approach for reducing the relative displacements was tackled by checking the contributing modes at every interface. A simulation-driven approach of "Panel Contribution Analysis" (PCA) has been introduced analyzing the contribution of several BIW & Closure panels. The optimized panel thicknesses minimized the displacement and reduced the likelihood of squeaking and chucking. A key feature of this approach is the use of the better method for DOE to attain the least number of experimental runs which allows for a weighed optimization of panel thickness. This method enables engineers to achieve the ideal trade-off between structural integrity, weight, cost, and BSR performance.