Investigation of the Impact of a Vehicle Front Hood Striker Geometry on Static Stiffness Performance

The front hood striker assembly, integral to the hood structure, experiences bending due to various factors such as repeated opening and closing, road impacts, and aerodynamic forces. This paper presents a numerical and experimental study of various striker assembly geometries, focusing on their effects on static stiffness performance. A static load is applied to generate displacement and calculate stiffness as the load-to-displacement ratio. It was discovered that by increasing the bending angle of the striker wire, an increase in section moment of inertia is achieved for the Z direction and an increase in the static stiffness on this particular direction, while for the Y direction a stiffness loss is observed for angles bigger than 95 degrees. Therefore, by improving the shape and the bending angle of the striker wire a good level of stiffness can be achieved while reducing the thickness and overall weight of the striker reinforcer.