SPOT WELD MODEL FOR AUTOMOTIVE FEM CRASH SIMULATIONS LIMITS

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This thesis deals with the finite element simulation of spot welded joint in crash analysis. Spot welding is a very common joining process in the automotive industry. It is cost effective and it provides a very fast production rate of automotive body components. Despite this advantage, spot welds are very susceptible to various types of loading conditions. Therefore they are prone to failure, if not designed properly, during their service life time. Therefore it is very important to understand the behaviour of spot welds and their failure characteristics. Generally, before the manufacturing stage, most of the automotive structural components are designed and tested in a virtual design environment. It is important to examine the crashworthiness of these body-in-white structures. To assess the crashworthiness of these structures they need to be represented correctly in virtual simulations, which necessitate the development of spot welded joint models to be included in crash analysis. Usually the models for the body-in-white structures are complicated and huge, which contains thousands of spot welded joints. Therefore a simple model for spot welded joints is desirable. Six different spot welded joint models were developed in this thesis to serve the above mentioned purpose. At the same time the simplicity issue of these developed spot weld models were also addressed, so that they can be integrated easily in a large assembly system, which consists of thousands of spot welded joints. Moreover for an effective modelling strategy, the computational costs incurred by the adopted spot weld models need also to be taken into consideration. Therefore the approach undertaken in this thesis was to study the characteristics of only one spot welded joint on a test coupon with the developed suitable spot weld nugget modelling configurations.

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