Optimizing the design and impact behavior of a polymeric enclosure

This paper focuses on the application of finite element analysis to design an electronic enclosure with improved impact resistance properties. With the growing push towards miniaturization there is a constant decrease in the wall thickness of the enclosure applications. This necessitates use of ribs to enhance the impact resistance. This study aims at investigating optimal design of ribs for improving impact resistance. The ‘DSGZ’ phenomenological constitutive model, which uniformly describes the entire range of stress–strain constitutive relationship of polymers under any monotonic loading mode is used to predict the plastic failure energies. Several simulation runs were performed based on the design parameters using a 23 factorial design of experiments. The results from these simulations were used to analyze and study the various design parameters and its influence on the impact energy. It was found that when designing enclosures with ribs with an objective to maximize the impact failure energy, stress should be laid on optimizing the ratio of wall thickness to rib height within permissible limits while center-to-center spacing between the ribs and rib thickness do not have a significant effect.