Connections between steel and aluminium using adhesive bonding combined with self-piercing riveting

Abstract

The multi-material design of modern car bodies requires joining technologies for dissimilar materials. Adhesive bonding in combination with self-piercing riveting is widely used for joining steel and aluminium structures. To guarantee crashworthiness and reliability of a car body, accurate and effcient numerical models of its materials and connections are required. Suitable component test setups are necessary for development and validation of such models. In this work, a novel test setup for adhesively bonded and point-wise connected components is presented. Here, load combinations comparable to a vehicle crash are introduced into the connections. The developed setup facilitates successive failure of multiple connections and enables a broad validation of numerical connection models.