Hood design-Week 2

HOOD DESIGNING using CATIA V5

We are to design the inner panel, reinforcements and placements of the latch and the hinge from the given Master Section and the Class A surface using the CATIA v5 software.

HOOD or BONNET

A hood is the front end covering over the engine room in car. Its design is made keeping lot many parameters and functionalities in mind. For example

• Safety

The utmost important factor to be considered to design an automobile. One of the ways to design a bonnet around for safety is thinking what happens after the front of the vehicle or the hood itself comes in contact or meets a crash. The centre area of the hood gives like a cushioning effect to the head of the pedestrian, child or adult, falling on it after the collision. The average height of the head to body ratio of a child and adult both are taken into consideration, as they are likely to come in contact first at around that area of the bonnet on collision. Pedestrians are kept in mind while designing the deflection angle of the front of the vehicle also.

• Aesthetic Appearance

Anything designed is always easy to sell and buy if its appealing to the eyes. The car’s front end is mostly the hood as it covers a large area of the vehicle. Therefore, its important the it also looks good and also does not make any compromises of the functionality part of the whole design.

 

• Quality

If the correct material and the correct thickness and the proper welds and all the other things required for the actual part to come in to existence is not provided as per the quality norms given by various organisations, governments in the world then the whole designing can be a failure and resulting in loss or remaking the component again. The quality if not met the standards can result in malfunctioning of all the functions desired when designed.

 

 

• Manufacturability

One of the major factors to keep in mind while designing the bonnet is the practicality. If the designed part is not aiding the practical usage or is in any way a hindrance is the ease of manufacturing it. Or even if it is costing way too much to get the desired results or dynamics.

The latch is the one part which keeps the bonnet closed, it has a proper docking to lock onto when closed with certain pressure. When the hood opens or closes, it does so in a radius of movement which ha its centre in the hinge axis, that is along the y axis of the car as shown by the circle in the figure

 

 

 

The tangent from the circle shows the line of movement of the latch. This is given direction by the circle and guided to lock properly with the striker when closing the hood

 

• Hemming

 

The automobile body parts are not left out open with a sharp edge or a corner. That done is definitely not safe as it can cut through anything with the force applied and cause fatal results during a collision also. Same goes with the bonnet too, though the corners are filleted with a certain radius, the edges are not left open and are bent with a certain measurement and procedure which is called hemming.