Abstract
The body structure of a bus is generally assembled by using various spot welded box sectional members. The shape of window pillar joint is ordinarily built up by T-type member. It has been shown that T-type member has problems like high stress concentrations, low fatigue strength and low structural rigidity. In this study, to solve these problems a new approach to optimize the design of the bus window pillar joint was tried by FEM analysis and experiments. To describe the shape of the gusset connecting the vertical and horizontal members of the T-type window pillar joint B-spline curve was adopted and this curve was optimized . It was found that the new model developed could effectively improve fatigue durability an structural rigidity.