Abstract
A passenger vehicle hood is subjected to multiple types of loads based on customer usage, assembly plant requirements, road load, environmental conditions and regulatory requirements. These loading requirements demand different FEA models that vary in terms of model content, orientation of hood (closed/open), or type of analysis (modal/static/dynamic). A new methodology is proposed, which has the ability to combine multiple loading scenarios, including transient hood slam and perform optimization, resulting in a single step topology & gauge optimization of the hood instead of sequential design process with back and forth manual iterations. The new technique helps to minimize the hood mass and meets desired performance targets by balancing topology of hood inner and gauges of hood reinforcements. The methodology has been applied successfully on four different vehicle programs.