Technical Paper
Improvement on the Fatigue Performance of BIW by Using Mechanical Clinching Joining Method
1999-03-01
1999-01-0368
The stiffness of autobody largely depend on the joint strength of welding spots. Weak welding joints lead to inferior stiffness, which lowers vehicle performance such as ride & handling and NVH(Noise Vibration Harshness). Resistance spot welding, major joining method of autobody, produces superior joint strength but its fatigue limit(fatigue strength at 107 cycle) is inferior, which implies that joint strength may be greatly affected by the fatigue. Mechanical clinching, on the other hand, has lower joint strength but its fatigue limit is higher than that of spot welding. This paper focused on the behavior of joint strength under cyclic loading in both resistance spot welding and mechanical clinching. The deterioration of joint strength during fatigue testing was examined by measuring monotonic shear tension force as a function of fatigue cycles at a given cyclic load.
