Design of hinge with door function to spreader gate

This thesis was performed at Zetterbergs Industri AB. Zetterbergs is designing, building and mounts body systems for trucks, including dumpers and tippers. The assignment for the thesis was to design a door hinge for a spreader gate. The spreader gate is the top of the two tailgates on a dumper or tipper and opens back and outwards when tipping the cargo. The spreader gate controls the mass flow of the material being tipped. Zetterbergs want to offer their customers an opportunity to also open the spreader gate as a door and place it along the outside of the tipper to get easier access to the platform when loading equipment. They already have an existing solution for both the tipper and the dumper, but there is a need to improve and coordinate these solutions. The existing solution is not entirely rigid which causes problems of sagging when used, and a result of this is heavy lifting for the operator. The process with designing a new hinge began with an initial study where, among others, the existing hinge and prototype solutions of the hinge at Zetterbergs were examined. To get to understand the process and which parts that needed to be taken into consideration when designing, a participation in the production was made. The initial study was finalized with the preparation of a user and technical specification. Following the initial study several concepts was generated with a method called “ the five step method”. Afterwards the concepts were evaluated and compared which lead to the selection of one of the concepts for a final design. The result of this thesis is a door hinge with tree different configurations. Those three configurations were made to fit the combinations between tipper and dumper as well as aluminum and steel hatch. The hinges are similar to each other and only a few details separate them. All components in the door hinge are adjusted for the production at Zetterbergs. The door hinge is designed in a way that prevents the operator from using it improperly