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The paper presents the work on the development of a joint design approach for adhesively bonded and spot-welded aluminium automotive structures. The approach includes an allowance for joint geometric variables, manufacturing variability and complex joint loading. An important aspect in the development of the approach has been to minimise the detail required to model the joints in a full vehicle model. The paper describes the development of the joint design approach and identifies many of the joint variables which may influence joint performance. The accuracy of the approach is demonstrated on a simple structure subjected to complex loading, and the use of the approach is illustrated on a full vehicle structure.

The strong interest in producing lightweight car bodies in aluminium has prompted the need to understand the behaviour of typical crash members fabricated using mainly AA5000 and AA6000 materials. In studying the sometimes complex impact load cases, it is often useful to examine the axial and bending collapse modes seperately in order to assess the geometric and material influences, and this is the approach taken in this paper. A number of organisations have reported various mechanistic approaches to predicting performance in axial and bending collapse, and our method has been to assess, and where necessary, refine the best of these for aluminium sections in order to produce effective design guidlines for the automotive industry. This work is largely complete for axial crush and examples of design application from concept to structural testing are given.