The present disclosure generally relates to an active material based closure hinge, an active material based latch, and an active material based alignment process, and more particularly, to a process for aligning closures to a frame.
The alignment as well as the flush and gap appearance of a vehicle door is typically based on the visual inspection and experience of an assembly line technician. In other instances, handheld fixtures are specially designed to align the door relative to predetermined specifications. In both cases, the process for adjusting the flush and gap appearance and aligning the vehicle door is manual. Current practice is to deform the door, body and hinge sheet metal manually, by bending, twisting and shoving the door until it is visually acceptable. Also, the latch position is adjusted by striking it in order to move it. This metal deformation and latch movement is unmeasured. The adjustability is generally limited and irreversible. Because the alignment process is manual and based on visual inspection, it is difficult to quantitatively measure the door adjustment process. Without quantitative measurements, developing statistical process control techniques is impractical. As a result, gap and flushness quality tends to be inconsistent from vehicle to vehicle.
There are two issues in making a door fit an opening. The first is that the door must be in the proper location and orientation (pose) within the opening. The second is that the contours of the door must match the contours of the opening. The invention disclosed herein addresses the first issue directly.
To those skilled in the art, it is known that six independent degrees of freedom (three translational and three rotational) are enough to adjust a rigid body to a desired pose. The more degrees of freedom internal to the hinges and latches, the less deformation that is required to adjust the pose of the door. Current hinge systems may have two degrees of freedom for adjustment considering the latch and hinge mechanisms. Thus, sheet metal deformation may be required to adjust the pose.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved closure hinge, latch and alignment process. It would be particularly advantageous if the deformation needed for closure adjustment were internal to the hinge and latch mechanisms themselves and thereby avoided deforming the sheet metal of the body, doors and hinges. This would allow the alignment process to be done in a consistent, quantifiable, and reversible manner.