Robust design of the lift-gate opening/closing efforts

The opening and closing efforts of the lift-gate system are important aspects of lift-gate design, and contribute towards customer perception of quality. A typical lift-gate system has a pair of pressurised gas struts, to control the motion of the lift-gate. Specification of the gas strut is very critical, since it directly affects the opening/closing effort requirement. Variation of the ambient temperature causes a variation in the gas-strut pressure. Minimising the effect of the gas strut pressure variation on the opening/closing efforts is the goal for robust design of the lift-gate system. In this paper we discuss a robust design method that makes the opening/closing efforts relatively insensitive to the temperature variation. Axiomatic design is employed to study the lift-gate design, in terms of its functional requirements (FR) and its design parameters (DP). The lift-gate system is simulated using ADAMS1 software used for analysis of multi-body systems. Taguchi's method of orthogonal arrays and signal-to-noise ratio is used for robust design.