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Quality in the automotive industry means development and manufacturing of vehicles whose specifications meet customer requirements. Among many other quality issues, door closing effort is a vehicle characteristic that strongly affects the customer first opinion about vehicle design. The door closing effort is affected by uncertainties in materials and manufacturing processes. The present paper presents a reliability-based method to evaluate the uncertainties associated with door closing effort due to manufacturing processes. A formulation is proposed to calculate that energy based on three components: energy used to compress air into the vehicle, energy used to compress the sealing and energy used to lock the door. In order to quantify the probability that the door closing effort is greater than a target value, reliability analysis concepts are used based on the uncertainties associated to latch position.

The door is the first system to interact with the customer, allowing the entrance into the vehicle, so it has been given great importance to its performance in all requirements. The automotive door related phenomena studies increased in the past years, once the customer and the market itself have changed their quality standards. The door closing effort is considered a quality issue by the customer, cases it is too high it contributes to quality decrease, based on ergonomics study, each OEM specifies to each vehicle an acceptable value for the closing effort. There is software that uses the finite element method and specific calculation plans for the door closing effort at project phase, but it is necessary lots of data usually not available for the engineer at concept phases. This study's objective is to measure each component contribution in door closing effort with the use of a simplified plan in order to help the product engineer in the door concept phases.