International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 12, Number 14 (2017) pp. 4248-4257 © Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com 4248 An Appliance Door Virtual Modeling For User Experience Design Filippo Cucinotta a1 and Felice Sfravara a2 a Department of Engineering, University of Messina, Contrada Di Dio (S. Agata), 98166 Messina, Italy. 1 Orcid: 0000-0002-0304-4004, Scopus ID: 57192216810 2 Orcid: 0000-0003-3922-8494, Scopus ID: 57192214583 Abstract Domestic appliance are widely used in all countries. During the design phase, it is very important to take advantage of new virtual prototyping technologies in order to improve the user expectations and put the feeling of the user with the device in the centre of the design. The paper deals with the complete simulation of the opening of the front door of an appliance like a refrigerator or an oven. The process is simulated with the use of ad-hoc built program that uses a combination of experimental parameters and virtual fluid dynamic simulations. Each moment involved during the opening of the door is evaluated and a comprehensive explanation of each of them is reported. The entire solving process is parametrized in order to use it in an iteration loop for eventually optimization of the User Experience and the comfort during the opening of the front door. A fridge case study is described and discussed. Keywords: User Experience (UX), Virtual Prototypes (VPs), user centred design, experience design, door appliance. INTRODUCTION Each field of engineering is involved in studying new approaches and new methods in order to improve the environmental efficiency and the User Experience (UX) of each product with different methodologies [1, 2]. A wide field of interest are the domestic appliances, because they are widely used in all industrialized countries, among them the most used ones are domestic refrigerators and ovens. The users intensively use each component of these devices during a day so it is very important to optimize each single component in order to improve the efficiency during the entire life. A user centred design can help to satisfy the user Expectations and give it the best UX. The study is complex because it involves different aspects and the ways for simulating this problem can be experimental tests or virtual simulations. For this reasons, Virtual Prototypes (VPs) are developed in order to help to predict the interaction between user and appliance. The studies can be conducted for improving different aspects in different 1 Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-3289867886 phases. One of these is the static condition, when the refrigerator or the oven work without interaction with the user. The problem involves the knowledge of the distribution of the air inside the refrigerator or the oven [3, 4], the efficiency of the sealing elements [5], the temperature exchange with the external environment [6, 7], the structural integrity of each material used [8]. For the study of the internal distribution of the air the better way is to use computational fluidynamics (CFD) simulations, from several years this approach is very reliable and it solves many engineering problems [9–13]. It is very useful in order to have, in preliminary design phase, information for to direct the project along the better way. The results of CFD simulations can be used for an optimization loop in a parametric model and so to link all the aspects of the problem [14]. A second condition is the interaction with the user, when the door must be open. The first aspect is the comfort and the difficulty relative to the opening of the door perceived by the user [15, 16], the second one is the mechanical and fluidynamics aspect during this process [17, 18]. In this case is not simple to simulate the interaction between user and device with virtual modeling, for this reason only experimental data exist in literature. A good review paper of the recent developments is proposed by Radermacher [19]. This article deals with the problem of the interaction between the user and domestic device. A combination of CFD results and physical formulation present in literature are used in order to solve the entire process of opening. This condition has been separated in two different phases and for each phase a complete explanation of the forces and moments involved is proposed. The entire process allows understanding which are the most important parameters in order to increase the comfort in opening phase. The use of CFD simulations helps to solve the problem of air and temperature interaction and help to have a better comprehension of the entire phenomena. All process is automatable and so it can be a good tool for investigating a design space.