Fender Design - Wheel Arch Challenge

WHEEL ARC AREA

The area between the surface of the front wheel and the fender edge is known as wheel arc area.

WHEEL ARC CALCULATION

• To avoid sand and stones chipping on the aesthetic part of the car wheel should be placed into the fender and there should be gap between the outer most area of the wheel to the outer edge of the front fender.
• There are different standards in countries like USA, European countries, Japan, and India as per their requirements.
• Standard gap distance will be set depending upon factors like population density of respective country as we know speed of the car decrease if population density is more. And it also depends upon the road condition
• After considering all the above-mentioned factors standard length is being set for example standard gap distance in Japan is minimum 5mm and in European country its minimum 10mm.

WHEEL ARC DISTANCE CALCULATION AS PER EUROPEAN STANDARDS

As per European standard clearance L should not be less than 10mm at all the 5 points SB, SA, SC, SD, and SE

• Plane should be created on the top face of the wheel and SA line should be created from center of the wheel as shown in Fig 1
• Similar lines SB should be drawn at an angle of 30° and line SC at angle 50° with respect to center of the wheel
• Vertical line should be created with height of 150mm from the horizontal plane and should get the intersection point
• Centre of the wheel and the intersection point should be connected with line and that is line SE.
• Bisecting line SD is created using in between lines SE and SD.
• Outer most edge of the fender should be projected using 2D projection curve option as shown in fig 2
• Intersection points should be generated between the lines and projected curve as shown in fig 3.
• All the intersection points should be then projected on the fender surface using projected curve option fig 5.
• Distance between the points will give the clearance value between wheel and the fender.

Following are the results observed

values observed are

• SA: 9.949mm (Fail)
• SB: 10mm (Pass)
• SC: 0.1139mm (Fail)
• SD: 2.8875mm (Fail)
• SE: 5.997mm (Fail)

Fig 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 shows the result.

CONCLUSION

AS we can see only line SB have clearance of 10mm that meets the European standards and all other lines SB, SC, SD and SE are having clearance below than 10mm which doesn’t meet the European standards. As a design engineers we have to give feedback in the form of report to the stylish engineer / team to alter the styling surface to meet European standards

After all the calculation we came to know that given fender doesn’t meet the European standards.