This conference paper was submitted for presentation at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Furniture tip-over accidents can be fatal, with more than 470 children in the United States (U.S.) having died from tip-overs since 2000. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), tip-overs also lead to an average of 22,500 emergency room-treated injuries each year. Aiming to stop this kind of devastating incidents, the Stop Tip-overs of Unstable, Risky Dressers on Youth Act (STURDY Act) was passed by the U.S. Congress on 23 December 2022 and went into effect on September 1, 2023. The act requires that Clothing Storage Units (CSUs) be tested for stability under several scenarios prior to being approved for sale in the United States. CSUs are designed and manufactured by organizations with expertise in products made of wood and wood-like materials, many of them smaller companies. CAD is routinely used in the design process, but simulation use is less common and many of the CSU producers do not have simulation experts on staff. Multi-body dynamics (MBD) software can easily simulate the tests required by the STURDY Act, but even with easy-to-use MBD products, the setup requirements, in terms of time and expertise, of CSU models for stability tests is not attractive to CSU designers. The STURDY Simulator was developed to provide designers of CSUs with a quick and easy method of evaluating a CSU design against the requirements of the STURDY Act. The STURDY Simulator runs within the same CAD system used by CSU designers and utilizes an advanced MBD solver for the calculations. With a few minutes of setup and a few more minutes to run the simulation, a CSU can be evaluated virtually against the testing methodologies of the STURDY Act. The simulator also assists designers by providing information about the CSU that extends beyond the requirements of the STURDY Act. This paper describes in detail the philosophy and implementation of the STURDY Simulator.