Root cause analysis of high duty automotive bolted joints loosening implementing systematic problem solving approach

Threaded fasteners are a notable cause of service and other related problems in automotive industry. Therefore,finding fast cost‐effective solutions is of great importance. Although fasteners are the most standardizedmechanical part, how to approach fastener failures is not enough systematized. The complication of the failuremodes of these standard parts is usually underestimated, which leads often to an ill‐defined problem, in contrastto well‐defined, resulting in incomplete, time consuming, expensive, or even wrong solutions. Therefore, to avoidproblems caused by a conventional approach of problem solving, a systematic approach has been proposed inbolt loosening root cause analysis on the grounds that bolted joints failures are often close‐knitted to the othersystems and the number of influencing factors is great.

Keywords:

Automotive , bolted‐joints , loosening , root‐cause , systematic