Hail Defender

The recent hail storms that devastated parts of Calgary, and surrounding regions, serve as the primary motivation for this project. The June 2020 hailstorm single-handedly caused $1.5 billion worth of damage to property and vehicles. Our customer research discovered that many vehicle owners possess third-party insurance with no hail coverage. Additionally, our research indicated that customers with insurance would rather prevent vehicle damage than deal with insurance companies, body shops and concede lost resale value. 

The limited number of solutions currently available on the market to protect driveway parked vehicles from hail damage are impractical, inconvenient, and too expensive. The most popular solutions on the market currently are fitted and inflatable car covers. Both require the customer to be outside with their vehicle and physically wrap the cover around the vehicle, a process that takes several minutes. In the event of a hailstorm being exposed to falling hailstones for this long is a severe safety risk. When the covers are installed preemptively, on a regular basis, they create a huge inconvenience for the customer, having to install the cover every time they park their vehicle, then removing, folding, and storing the cover each time they wish to drive their vehicles. On top of this for households with multiple vehicles, these solutions can be quite costly as each cover only protects one vehicle. 

Our product addresses all these issues by creating a fully motorized and retractable hail cover. The Hail Defender provides complete protection to two vehicles and can be completely controlled from the safety of one’s own home.

Our product is innovative through its actuation method and ease of use. Our competitors do not offer powered solutions for protecting vehicles parked on a driveway. The implementation of a motorized system to retract and expand a hail cover over two vehicles provides something completely new to the hail protection industry. 

Our motorized actuation method is also innovative in itself. Our mechanism used the principles of a Sarrus Linkage combined with a spring-loaded 2 arm structure to create linear motion from the motor’s rotational motion. This allows us to eliminate the need for excessively long structural components or the use of too many joint connections, which would have been required if using a traditional linear actuator and would have weakened the structure when it’s fully extended position. The integration of spring-based actuation also reduces the power required from the motor to extend the cover. This innovative component allows us to use a less expensive motor, as well as reduce energy usage. 

The Hail Defender is also innovative in its use of High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) mesh as its method of protecting the vehicles. HDPE mesh has been successfully applied for hail protection in the agricultural industry, but the Hail Defender would be the first product to bring this new technology to the residential vehicle protection industry.

Our design solution succeeds in solving all the issues that inspired this project and all the issues that exist in our competitors. When in its fully extended position the device covers the vehicle from every direction with a high-density polyethylene mesh. This mesh is tested and certified for hail protection, meaning the vehicles will be completely protected from hail damage. The device is motorized, and thus effective in eliminating the inconvenience and safety risk of hand operated devices. With this device a simple press of the button is all that is required to protect not one but both vehicles on the driveway, another factor that makes our solution more effective than existing alternatives. At an anticipated retail price of $1620 our solution accomplishes its goals for a very competitive price in the industry.

Validation of our design began by using SolidWorks to do a motion analysis and check for stresses in just free loading scenarios. We further looked to make sure that our design did not have any interferences in the motion using the interference checking evaluation tool available in SolidWorks. SolidWorks allows us to appoint materials for each sub component and part, this helps us find accurate values of mass and be able to do verifications and calculations with some accuracy. SolidWorks also allows for flow simulations, which enabled us to simulate a high wind scenario for the Hail Defender. The scenario was based in Calgary, and allowed us to find how much deformation occurred in the mechanism at that wind speed, which was extremely miniscule. These are some ways the mechanism was validated in terms of design. 

The biggest validation for us was checking if the spring-loaded mechanism that we designed was going to work, this was difficult to model in solidworks. However, we were able to calculate the spring forces required by hand and then test it out in a 3D printed prototype. This prototype provided us with the final method of validating our design as the spring loaded system worked as anticipated.

Based on our mathematical calculations, solid works validations, and prototype testing we believe we have successfully demonstrated that our product is a feasible method of solving this problem. The fact our product addresses an important and growing concern of Calgary residents in a way that is not currently available on the market and based on our market research we believe there is demand for the product. Our primary hurdle however would be to improve the aesthetics of the product, especially when in its retracted position. We believe this will be crucial in making this a feasible and successful business venture.