Automotive seating design is subject to numerous competing objectives aimed at satisfying comfort and safety requirements. Manufacturing inducted variation in seat track rolling effort is particularly relevant to customer comfort and perceived product quality. Historically, track, assemblies have been designed solely with strength and material use in mind. Consideration of customer perceived quality (such as functional effort) was not prioritized at the concept stage, as it was typically considered as too difficult, and time consuming to consider at the stage of the development cycle where many physical properties remained undefined. However, assessing customer perceived quality later in the design cycle following the commissioning of manufacturing when tooling has been laid down, can incur significant cost penalties if the selected concept is sensitive to manufacturing variation. The quality of the customer experience has then to be managed with at the manufacturing stage for the life of the product with costly counter measures. Estimating sensitivity to manufacturing variation at the conceptual design stage will reduce the cost of poor quality to a minimum (within the given design solution set), and highlight control factors in the selected concept which need to be prioritized from an ongoing quality perspective. This in turn allows the construction of metrology and process control strategies designed to mitigate the residual risk. In this work a rapidly implemented manufacturing sensitivity benchmarking study was carried out for alternative automotive seat track designs. The benchmarking study focused on seat track rolling effort by considering variation in bearing clearance and variation in bearing contact force. Significant variation in sensitivity to manufacturing variation was identified between alternative automotive seat track designs. The benchmarking study identified conceptual designs which offer superior performance robustness compared to existing designs. The benchmarking approach applied in this work demonstrated a method of rapidly assessing the relative robustness of automotive seat tracks when subject to expected manufacturing variation. This outcome assists automotive manufacturers to apply a systematic approach to automotive seat design based on a robust evaluation of alternative conceptual seat track embodiments.


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    Title :

    Benchmarking study of automotive seat track sensitivity to manufacturing variation


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2011


    Size :

    10 Seiten, 10 Bilder, 7 Tabellen, 7 Quellen




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English




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