DESIGN, ANALYSIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF PROTOTYPE

MODEL OF COMPOSITE INTENSIVE SIDE DOOR PADDING

IN CARS
ABSTARCT
The project is carried out in order to allow more innovation in the design, to provide
improved impact stiffness on the side door panels of the commercial and domestic
vehicles. The material selection is done among the alloys and composites that
provides structural stiffness. Structural applications of polymer composite materials
are expected to provide significant mass reductions over the steel components that
they replace. Closures are often targeted for mass reduction because they have
minimal influence on the structural integrity of the vehicle as a whole. Prototype
closures can often be substituted onto existing vehicles with little or no changes to the
rest of the vehicle. In this work, attention is focused strictly on the front side door. Due
to vehicle symmetry, any mass reduction achieved in a side door is doubled on the
vehicle. An additional advantage of developing a low mass side door is that it can be
easily commonized for high volume. Using stiffness criteria, finite element analysis is
used to develop a minimum mass design using composite sandwich structures.
Preforms are handcrafted from molded foam cores wrapped with a combination of
woven and stitch-bonded unidirectional glass fiber and polyester resins. The design
and analysis is carried out in CATIA v5 and ANSYS softwares to provide dimensional
and experimental data to simulate load conditions.