Robust design of the lift-gate opening/closing efforts

The opening and closing efforts of the lift-gate system are important aspects of lift-ate design, and contributes towards customer perception of quality. A typical lift-gate system has a pair of pressurized 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 ill the gas-strut pressure. Minimizing the effect of the gas strut pressure variation oil the opening/closing efforts is the goal for robust design of the lift-gate system.. Ill 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, ill terms of its functional requirements (FR) and its design parameters ( DIP). The lift-gate system is simulated using ADAMS((R)) software used for analysis of multi-body systems. Taguchi's method of orthogonal arrays and signal-to-noise ratio is used For robust design.