Acta Mechanica Slovaca 2014, 18(3):6-12 | DOI: 10.21496/ams.2014.025

Mechanical Joining of Steel Sheets in Automotive Industry

Emil Spišák, Ľuboš Kaščák^*

Institute of Technology and Management, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Košice, Mäsiarska 74, 040 01 Košice, Slovakia

Various ferrous and non-ferrous materials and their combinations are used in car body production in automotive industry. These materials need to fulfil several criteria before being approved. Some of the criteria are the results of regulation and legislation with the environmental and safety concerns and some are the requirements of the customers. In many occasions different factors are conflicting and therefore a successful design would only be possible through an optimized and balanced solution. The most commonly used method for joining the materials is resistance spot welding. Some materials or their combinations are very difficult or even impossible to join by resistance spot welding. Therefore, the car producers are seeking for alternative joining methods such as cold metal transfer, TOPTIG or mechanical joining. The paper deals with evaluation of properties of the joints made by two methods of mechanical joining - clinching and clinch-riveting. The steel sheets of DX51D+Z, H220PD and DC06 were used for experiments. The tensile test for observing the carrying capacity, metallographicall analysis and microhardness test were used for the evaluation of joints properties.

Keywords: Clinching, carrying capacity, clinchriveting, metallography, microhardness

Published: October 31, 2014  Show citation