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To highlight the importance of resistance spot weld in the automotive industry, it's important know that a vehicle has on average 4,000 welding spots [BROWN; SCHWABER 2000] and based on worldwide vehicle production in 2015 with 90.78 million vehicles produced [OICA, 2015], were performed more than 363 billion welding spots. The number of machines in manual and automatic workstations (robots), based on 20 points by equipment and production of 45 vehicles / hour add up more than 20 million of welding machines in all over world. According new production lines are being introduced using the adaptive dynamic resistance control the welding constant current control are being replaced, so understand this technology and know implement it with efficiency needs a deep knowledge in how dynamic resistance works and correlate his behavior with the problems that causes failures in welding, so is necessary give for the welding engineers this knowledge.

Purpose: In the case study presented, the DFA (Design for Assembly) technique is applied to an automotive fuel intake cover of a currently produced vehicle in order to simplify the current product design. Design/methodology/approach: DFMA and Lucas methodology, which is used in this study, can be adopted not only for the development phase of new products, but also for already developed products, reducing the number of components and the costs. Findings: The Lucas methodology approach for the DFMA has been applied in a successful way to improve a fuel intake cover. Research limitations/implications: Only a prototype part was tested. More specimens must be tested to validate final design. Practical implications: The application of this technique allowed a product cost saving of 10%, a tooling saving of 5%, and a significant product simplification without losing its original functionality.

Sheet metal forming processes are increasingly focused on tribological parameters, and the sheet metal surface topography is nowadays a characteristic that show great potential for the process optimisation. In this paper, three different surface textures of an aluminium alloy AA 6016-T4 are characterised by 2D and 3D surface analysis methods. The effects of the surface topography on the friction behaviour and the formability were investigated by means a twist-compression test and a deep-drawing test, respectively.