Design of an industrial door

Abstract: This report is the result of a product development project conducted at
Sealeck Pty. Ltd, Adelaide, Australia. The project is the master thesis
that Anton Bergstrom and Jimmy Lundin are required to write in order to
obtain a Master of Science degree in Ergonomic design and production
engineering at Lulea University of technology.
Sealeck manufactures safety metal clad doors and windows and most jobs are
customized. Currently the doors are assembled manually, but in the future
Sealeck wants to assemble the doors completely or partially with the use of
robotics. This type of production improvement requires a new type of door
design, since the current solution involves aluminium cleats which are used
to mechanically lock the two door halves together. The cleats are mounted
with the help of a pneumatic chip hammer which take some time and make the
assembly process hard to automate. Therefore Sealeck wanted the project
team to come up with an improved door design that didn’t involve cleats and
that could be manufactured with present technology.
In order to develop the new door design a systematic approach was used. The
systematic development process contains a number of steps which in the end
leads to a final concept and hopefully a product ready for production. The
first step was gathering information to get a basic understanding of the
problem. This was done by participating in the production, benchmarking
competitors, talking to employees and doing patent database searches. When
this was done, sub solution concepts were generated and discussed with a
focus group consisting of the project team, the R&D engineer and the
managing director. Concepts were combined and further developed into
several functioning prototypes. Each prototype was put through a fatigue
test and compared to the current cleat based door. Improvements were made
until a satisfactory concept had been developed.
The final concept is a door which doesn’t use aluminium cleats, is easy to
assemble, self aligning and manufacturable with the equipment used today.
To make further product development easier for Sealeck, guidelines for
manufacturing custom doors with our solutions are attached in the appendix.