Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, cilt.11, sa.8, ss.383-407, 2018 (Hakemli Dergi)
Because of their technical advantages over ordinary metal springs, gas
springs find usage in wide range of applications from furniture to
aerospace industry as lifting, lowering or damping assists. Their
integration to the tailgate operations in automotive industry is a
challenging area, where not only the fundamental gas spring
characteristics but also the mounting settings, working environment and
tailgate body structure should be considered. The design and integration
of these components will determine manual force exertion of operators
thus the consideration of ergonomic characteristics of different
populations is crucial. This paper introduces a recent visual academic
software package, entitled TEM-SOFT, which is developed as a part of
this research to perform ergo-mechanic simulations of tailgate
operations with a fast, reliable and contemporary engineering approach
and it is suitable for engineers and under-post graduate level students
of mechanical and industrial engineering programs in the universities.
The software developed and presented in this paper features all aspects
of tailgate-gas spring operations considering the assembly scheme,
tailgate mass center, gas spring type and working temperature in order
to compute the required manual forces and the individual and combined
impacts of acting parameters. Sufficient amount of scenarios were
considered and the results were evaluated and discussed extensively. In
addition to the other key findings, conducted research has shown that
stronger gas springs, more effectively tend to move the critical
tailgate position angle—where no operator force is needed to keep the
tailgate opening—to the initial phases of the opening operation. A
trade-off of this benefit is a superior initial manual force during
closing.