Fender Design - Wheel Arch Challenge

 FENDER WHEELARCH AREA:

The wheel arch is the semicircular part positioned above the wheel of a vehicle. It is an integrated part of a fender assembly.

The wheel arch area have some standard specification to measure the clearance between the tire and fender. If the tire lies outside the fender, it does more chipping cause a damage to pedestrian and also to the car. To have a pedestrian safety in mind, we need to position the tire inside the fender. For that we have certain standard regulations.

• Japan regulation
• US regulation
• European regulation

Here the main objective of the challenge is to test whether the give tire and fender is eligible to qualify with European Regulation of Fender design or not.

European Regulation:

• The horizontal and the vertical axis is drawn at the wheel center. The vertical axis is intersected at fender is labelled as a SA.
• Draw the angle line of 30⁰ forward and 50⁰ rearward and it labelled as SB and SC.
• Draw a vertical line perpendicular to the horizontal axis, and normal line from the intersection point on the fender labelled as SE.
• The mid angle line between the SC and SE labelled as SD.
• At all labelled five section, the value of the L should have greater than the 10 mm to satisfy the European regulation.

The below following steps are followed:

• A sketch is created on the datum plane which is at the outermost portion of the wheel.

• Create the intersection points on the line which are intersecting at the fender outermost portion.
• Project those points on to the fender part.
• Measure the distance between sketch intersection points and the project point. Then we get the distance of L at each section.

Section SA:

Section SB:

Section SC:

Section SD:

 

Section SE:

Conclusion:

The value of L is measured at all five loaction and labelled the table. The table shows that only at Section SB have 10 mm clearence and at remaining four sections value will not have more than 10mm. with the help of measured data, the given fender does not qualify the European standard for wheel arc area.