Abstract
A typical side door assembly in an automobile car undergoes repeated usage of opening and closing in its life. In addition, abuse of door opening beyond the designed opening angle would result in higher stresses near the door hinge and adjoining connections near check link. Such repeated abuse tests conducted on a physical sample may result in cracks in parent material near spot-welds (HAZ) after a fixed number of cycles, which can be attributed to fatigue failure. So, deciding the location of spot welds and predicting the fatigue strength during early design phase using CAE gains importance. With many approaches available in the industry to represent spot weld, the challenge is to identify the best one that correlates well with physical tests and deliver consistent results. The main objective of this paper is to provide information on the sensitivity of different CAE modeling parameters such as mesh discretization near spot-welds/HAZ, modeling of surface contacts, bolt preload at hinges that would influence spot-weld fatigue life prediction and how simulation accuracy is improved during check-link durability test cycle by tuning these parameters. ABAQUS implicit solver is used for initial calculation of stress, displacement, effective plastic strains, etc. and nCode design-life for fatigue life estimation.