Design of Dual Sliding Door Mechanism for a Small Sized Car 2007-01-0461

Swing-out doors can easily cause damage to adjacent parked vehicles in tight parking spaces. Also, they are not traffic-friendly when the vehicles are parallel parked on busy road sides. This paper makes an attempt to come up with an innovative to design and develop a mechanism for dual sliding doors for a small sized car. The doors are supported only on two points of contact as compared to the usual sliding minivan doors which have three contact supports for sliding. These two points are called the “Upper control link and Lower support arm”. To open the door, first the door, has to push out by 90 degrees and then it has to slide in the fore-aft direction to open or close. For the doors, a track was placed just below the window at the beltline location and a triangular sub-roller assembly was designed for sliding motion. A rail was placed on the rocker panel of the space frame which has three rollers assembled in such a way that they would compensate for the weight of the door and rigidly secure the door during sliding. This paper explains the mechanism in detail and also discusses safety issues linked to selection of engineering materials for the doors.