New CAE Methodology and experimental validation for vehicle hoods

The main motivation of this Thesis, developed during an internship in Toyota Motor Europe, is the review of the current methodology used by KINO for structural CAE analysis on closures components. The current method is mainly based on CATIA CAE software evaluations, but the precision and the capabilities of this software are limited. This is the main reason for choosing a Nastran CAE based methodology, with ANSA as main software: this configuration can give more precision and accuracy, leading to an improvement on the final result. Furthermore, the possibility to automatize the process through textual input .fem files leads to a reduction of time spent and enables a better generalization to different models making possible to investigate a higher number of variations. The whole procedure is described in the Thesis, and the main steps are listed below: 1.??Choice of closure components and of the performances to be converted. 2.??Implementation of the Nastran CAE models. 3.??Validation of the CAE methodology with testing in TME workshop. 4.??Proposal of judgement criteria.