Week 8 - Challenge 4 - Bumper
Week 8 - Challenge 4 - Bumper
AIM: To create a body of Bumper from the input given which was the A-surface of a Bumper. The created body should be a closed solid volume which should be feasible for manufacturing and Tooling. The draft angle and draft analysis of the component should…
INTRODUCTION
A bumper is a structure attached to or integrated with the front and rear ends of a motor vehicle, to absorb impact in a minor collision, ideally minimizing repair costs.
They are designed to absorb impact to the front and rear of vehicles and minimize low-speed collision damage. Today, standard passenger vehicle bumpers have a rigid reinforcing bar under the outer cover, with sections of compressible foam or plastic underneath.
A bumper is made up of four parts:
- Bumper cover.
- The bumper absorber.
- The bumper reinforcement bar.
- The bumper mounting system.
The first car bumpers were created all the way back in 1901 and consisted of metal beams attached to the front and rear of the car to protect it during a low-speed collision. Designed to protect the expensive and fragile components like the headlights, tail lights, hood, exhaust, and cooling systems, early metal bumpers were focused on sheer resilience.
Modern consumer production cars have almost completely switched over to plastic bumpers. Modern car bumpers are made from thermoplastic olefins, a blend of plastic molecules, rubber, and a reinforcing filler like carbon fibre or calcium carbonate. This blend of materials creates a scratch and impact-resistant plastic that can bond with a wide range of paints and finishes, making it ideal for vehicle bumpers.
Plastic is the preferred material for modern car bumpers for several reasons. First and foremost, plastic is much lighter and more aerodynamic than metal, which improves the car's fuel efficiency. Plastic is also easier to shape, which is useful during both the manufacturing and bumper repair process.

DESIGN METHODOLOGY
Skin data would be provided to us by the styling team to us.
Class-A surface means visible surface. It gives the aesthetic of the component which is created by the styling team and gives to the part design engineer to create the part with all engineering aspects.

The first step is to check the continuity of the class A surface. This is to ensure that there is no gap between surfaces. If we find any then we should fix that first.
Class-A continuity check
Analyse the class A surface through visual inspection.
To make sure that the given surface has no gap in between them. We can check it also with the help of Join or boundary commands.
SURFACE-B CREATION
Class-B surface means thickness of a part it is not visible and is inside part. In other words, Class-B surface is a surface below a certain thickness from the class-A surface. This is the surface that contains engineering aspects of a model.
- Offset the class-A surface to 3mm inward direction.
- Rework on the patches and discontinuity of the offset surfaces using the features like extract, multi-extract, sweep, multi-section surfaces, extrapolate.
- To ensure the continuity of the Class-B surfaces check the boundary command to find out the boundary.
- Hence class-B surface creation is done.



SURFACE-C Creation
Surface that joins class-A and class-B surfaces is class-C surface. Class C is often specified for interior surfaces not readily visible, surfaces that will be covered by another part when assembled
Since it is a complex class-A surface, we cannot simply create the class-A boundary curve and sweep it at one shot. Hence, we need to create smaller curves using multi-extract command and then create sweep of 90 degree with reference to the surface option. sweeps at the midportion of the bumper should have a 93 degree value to pass the draft analysis.

- Join the sweeps using the join command and the class-c surface is created.
First step is to join the CLASS-A surface with CLASS-C surface.
Then Trim the Joined surface with CLASS-B surface to achieve the final Bumper surface.

raft analysis of the Final part body
Same procedure for the draft analysis of CLASS-A surface is followed.
- Change the view mode to material shading
- Align the Compass with Tooling axis.
- Lock the draft direction and perform the Draft analysis.
