Hood design-Week 2
Aim- Design Hood Outer Panel, Inner Panel and the necessary reinforcements.
ASSEMBLY of Hood Inner Panel, Outer Panel, Latch, Hinge and the Reinforcements.
Introduction
The hood or bonnet is the hinged cover over the engine of motor vehicles. Hoods can open to allow access to the engine compartment (or trunk on rear-engine and some mid-engine vehicles) for maintenance and repair. In design perspective hood should meet some specific conditions like pedestrian safety, hood head zone for the lock striker, force distribution when subjected to frontal collision (occupant safety), manufacturability etc.
A typical hood assembly consist of hood outer panel, inner panel, latch and striker, hinge, hood stay. Hood stay is an apparatus for supporting the engine hood of a moto vehicle in its open position. The purpose of opening the engine hood is for inspecting engine room, replenishing cooling water and engine oil, changing parts and making repairs etc. Common types of hood stays are Support Rod and Gas Stay. Support rods are manually operated and they are cost effective and simple to design whereas gas stays require no man power but they are costly. Hood are typically made out of the same material as the rest of the bodywork. This may include steel and aluminium. Deep drawing, hemming, blanking and piercing are the common sheet metal operations that are used in manufacturing hoods in automotive industries.
Data to be used:
Hood Thickness Information
- Outer Panel Thickness = 0.75mm
- Inner Panel Thickness = 0.75mm
- Reinforcement Thickness = 1.5mm
HOOD MASTER SECTION
Components of hoods
- Hood Outer Panel
- Hood Inner Panel
- hinge and hinge assembly
- Striker
Hood Outer Panel
Outer panels are the aesthetic elements of a car. It is the styling team who provides the skin for the outer panel. The shape, position and size of the hood should satisfy the safety norms. So while designing the hood we should give more importance to pedestrian safety. The outer panel is attached to the inner panel by hemming. So, it is necessary to provide required hemming flange and reliefs for the hemming operation. We also provide mastic sealants between outer panel and inner panel to reduce vibration.
Hood inner panel
Inner panel is the part that gives strength and rigidity to the outer panel. The master section represents the initial emboss shape and size. Then we provide the emboss for the latch and hinge elements after fixing the location.
Euro NCAP standards followed:
We design the hood panel for the safety of the passengers inside the cars but at the same time, we have to protect the pedestrian walking on the road. This is what improves the standard and quality of the car. Whenever the car hits a pedestrian it should cause minimum damage to the pedestrian. For this, we have to remove material from the inner panel at specific portions.
Here the wrap around distance comes into the picture, the wrap-around distance is the area covered by the hood on the car. This distance is used to differentiate the adult impact zone and child impact zone.
Wrap around distance
We design the embosses on the inner-panel to reduce the material from the areas which lie on the Adult Head Impact Zone and Child Heat Impact Zone. By removing the material from these areas, we intend to weaken it, anything that hits the bonnet on these positions will experience minimum impact possible. This improves the safety of the pedestrian in an unfortunate event.
Hinge assembly
the three parts of a hing
Latch Trajectory
Latch trajectory is given by the circle drawn from the hinge axis point. Hinge axis point is the centre point of the hinge axis. First, we can fix either the latch or the hinge. If we have fixed the hinge position then we should plot the Trajectory circle for the latch. For proper mating condition the striker axis through the tip of the striker should be tangential to the latch trajectory.
Emboss definitions
Throughout the inner panel we provide different embosses. We can increase the stiffness of the inner panel through these embosses. The shape and size of the embosses also determines the direction of the force distribution resulted from frontal collision. The force should be always distributed away from the passengers. Here in the figure the embosses are designed in such a way that the force is directed to either sides of the car.
Hemming
Hemming is a forming operation in which the edges of the sheet are folded or folded over another part in order to achieve a tight fit. Normally hemming operations are used to connect parts together, to improve the appearance of a part and to reinforce part edges.
In car part production, hemming is used in assembly as a secondary operation after deep drawing, trimming and flanging operations to join two sheet metal parts (outer and inner) together. Typical parts for this type of assembly are hoods, doors, trunk lids and fenders.
The accuracy of the hemming operation is very important since it affects the appearance of the surface and surface quality. Material deformations, which occur during the hemming process, can lead to dimensional variations and other defects in parts. Typical hemming defects are splits or wrinkles in the flange, material overlaps in the corner areas or material roll-in. This is why it is important to provide required reliefs at the corners.
There are two types of hemming operations,
- Conventional die hemming
In conventional die hemming, the flange is folded over the entire length with a hemming tool.
- Roll hemming
It is the roll hemming process that is used for automotive sheet metals. Roll hemming is carried out incrementally with a hemming roller. An industrial robot guides the hemming roller and forms the flange. Roll hemming operation can also be divided into several pre-hemming and final hemming process steps. Roll hemming is very flexible to use and tool costs are significantly lower as compared to those of conventional die hemming. However, the cycle times are much higher since the hemming is realized using a hemming roller which follows a defined path.
Relief section:
Final Assembly
