Week 11 - Final project

AIM:

To create a solid body of Side Door plastic trim including the engineering features using catia v5 tool using given A class surface and master section and adding thickness.

INTRODUCTION :

Side Door Plastic Trim

An interior component attached to the inner side of the door. This product does more than merely improve the appearance of the vehicle interior. Rather, it is a vital module component that creates a more comfortable interior by providing a variety of accouterments and functions.

OVERVIEW DESIGN LIFE CYCLE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

Product Development Process:

• Concept/ideation

This is the concept and ideation stage during which a product’s functional and performance requirements can be defined along with buyer personas or ‘the voice of the customer’. Customer requirements and innovative functionality design ideas are floated and explored freely to find compelling potential solutions that answer an identified market need.

• Feasibility study and design planning

The feasibility phase gives management an opportunity to evaluate a project’s potential success, reviewing and refining the business case from various angles. During this phase, the project team reviews product design concepts. They then select the design that best fulfils the previously defined user requirements. Now, the detailed, exhaustive project requirements are assembled that will guide the design and development phase.

• Design and development

In this phase, formal engineering specifications are created. Verification and validation plans are developed for the future. These are the final quality checks that will systematically determine that all agreed deliverables are present and working in the end product. The product is then developed against the designs, with regular checks made throughout the process to assess and mitigate the risk of its failure for the end-user and the project itself.

• Testing & verification

Comprehensive testing of the final product takes place to evaluate the robustness of the design and its ability to meet customer and performance requirements. Verification takes place against the design requirements identified in stage 2.

• Validation & collateral production

Validation takes place against the customer needs that have been identified at the ideation stage. Collateral is finalised and prepared to support the manufacture and launch phase.

• Manufacture/launch

Plans, specs and other relevant documentation are transferred to manufacture for production, or software products and updates are released to customers. Marketing and launch plans are finalised and activated. Software products are released to customers electronically as updates or downloads.

• Improvement

The new product becomes part of the company’s portfolio. Ongoing product management ensures the product is subject to continuous upgrades and improvement. CAPA processes are in place to feed into these actions.

The Stages of Design Life Cycle are

Concept Sketches:

Concept sketches are rough idea of free hand sketch obtained through styling team and will be used to prepare the Model. It is usually done through pen and paper and through the painting software. This is will be used to generate the concept for preparing the model by incorporating various styles and information obtained through the stakeholders

Class A Creation:

After finalizing the concept the sketches are usually worked in software’s such as Autodesk Alias to create Class A Surface

Clay Modeling :

The Class A Surface is concurrently worked by clay modelers to brainstorm and benchmark the styling of the product and later the Concept is validated by bringing up a rough clay model and then it is passed on to the Design team for the preparation of New Product Design (NPD) CAD.

NPD CAD :

This where the development of surfaces to parts in CAD kick off and Design engineers involvement is vital in this stage.

The Designers will work on the Input Class A surfaces which are validated from the Feasibility team

The procedure followed in creation of the plastic New Product Design are

• Tooling Axis
• B Surface Creation
• C Surface Creation
• Closed Body Creation
• Draft Analysis

PROCEDURE:

1) Input Given :

Design of Interior Door trim:
Interior Door trim consists of four components
1)Lower Substrate
2)Upper Substrate
3)Map Pocket
4)Door Arm Rest

2) A Class Surface

In automotive design, a class A surface is any of a set of freeform surfaces of high efficiency and quality. Although, strictly, it is nothing more than saying the surfaces have curvature and tangency alignment – to ideal aesthetical reflection quality, many people interpret class A surfaces to have G2 (or even G3) curvature continuity to one another. Class A surfacing is done using computer-aided industrial design applications. Class A surface modellers are also called "digital sculptors" in the industry. Industrial designers develop their design styling through the A-Surface, the physical surface the end user can feel, touch, see etc.

3)Tooling Axis

Tooling axis is nothing but the direction in which the core and cavity opens and closes. Design engineer works is to analyse the Class A surface and find out the best possible tooling direction keeping in mind all the draft angle is with respect to the tooling axis so that the component can be easily ejected from the moulds.

Door Arm Rest

Map Pocket

Lower Substrate

4) Draft Analysis

The Draft Analysis command enables you to detect if the part you drafted will be easily removed. This type of analysis is performed based on color ranges identifying zones on the analyzed element where the deviation from the draft direction at any point, corresponds to specified values.

Draft angles are very important in thermoforming product design. If the product is formed onto a female or negative mold, it shrinks away from the mold sidewalls. As a result, true female or negative products can be thermoformed with vertical walls having zero draft angles. Parts Cannot be ejected from the tool if it is at 90 degree surface.for the reason,A small Draft angle is to be provide for each and every surface s of the Component in order to easy removal of component from the moulds without any defects.Draft is the angle in which the part is tapered to aloow it to release.Most of the part require minimum 1/2 degree to 1 degree however 3 degrees are widely accepeted in plastic component design.Draft Analysis is the technique used to analise weather our designed product are manufacturable with required conditions or not.

Map pocket

Door Arm Rest

Lower Substrate

• Some surfaces which are not clearing the draft analysis needsimprovement in the A class surface.

5) B Class Surface Creation

Represent internal and/or functional surfaces. This cluster exemplary includes derived surfaces created by offset operations from class A surfaces to define the thickness of material. In this file it is important to link class B surfaces geometrically to enable an adaptation to class A surfaces automatically in case of styling change.

After creating the tooling axis, B surface is to be created which is nothing but the surface parallel to the A surface. B surface contains all the fillets and the edges which the A surface contains.

Map pocket

Door Arm Rest

Lower Substrate

6) C Class Surface Creation

Class C Surface is swept along the boundry of the Class A at an angle perpendicular to the CLASS A surface with respect to the tooling axis direction with a draft angle of 3 degree.

Map pocket

Door Arm Rest

Lower Substrate

7) Joining CLASS A, B and C Surfaces to get a Closed Surfaces

After finishing all the 3 surfaces, join the class A and class C surface together using the Join command. Now, the joined surfaces are then trimmed with class B surface to form a closed surface.

Map pocket

Door Arm Rest

Lower Substrate

Now, switch to Part design and Add the thickness to the closed surface in order to get the closed solid body as shown in the figure below.

Map pocket

Door Arm Rest

Lower Substrate

8) Creation of Flanges, Ribs,Dog house and Heat Stakes :

Dog House :

Create the dog house as per the design rules and give the required draft angle.

• Doghouse wall thickness at the intersection of the part wall ( C ) should be 40% or less than the main wall stock ( T ).

• Height of ( B ) should be between 3.0 – 6.0 mm

Ribs :

Create the ribs as per the design rules and give the required draft angle. Ribs are created to increase the stiffness and strength of the surface.

Heat Stakes:

Heat Staking is a pulsed-heat process to join two or more parts out of which one at least is made of plastic. The process is to deform the plastic material using heat and force at a set process time. The bond is made by partially de-forming the plastic part in order to fix the other.

Map pocket

Door Arm Rest

Lower Substrate

9) Draft Analysis of the Final Component

Lower Substrate

Map pocket

• Some surfaces which are not clearing the draft analysis needsimprovement in the A class surface.

Final Model Image:

Result :

• Class A, B and C surface was created as per the automotive standards using catia v5software.
• Draft analysis was performed for the built model and it could be seen that the draft was under permissible limit for the manufacturing of the component.
• B side features were created for the component as per the design rules.