Vitalij Janzen

Innovative and Highly Productive Joining Technologies for Multi-Material Lightweight Car Body Structures

Driven by increasing costs for energy and raw material and especially by the European CO2-emission laws, automotive industry faces the challenge to develop more lightweight and at the same time still rigid and crash-stable car bodies, that are affordable for large-scale production. The implementation of weight-reduced constructions depends not only on the availability of lightweight materials and related forming technologies, but also on cost-efficient and reliable joining technologies suitable for multi-material design. This article discusses the challenges and requirements for these technologies, based on the example of joining aluminium with press-hardened boron steels, what is considered as a very important material combination for affordable future lightweight mobility. Besides a presentation of recent developments for extending the process limits of conventional mechanical joining methods, new promising technologies such as resistance element welding are introduced. In addition, the performance, advantages, and disadvantages of the presented technologies are compared and discussed.

Innovative joining technologies for multi-material structures

The affordable implementation of lightweight constructions in automotive engineering depends not only on the availability of suitable processing technologies for new lightweight materials but also on suitable, cost-efficient joining methods for multi-material combinations with high process reliability. Therefore, joining technology plays a key role in realizing energy-efficient vehicles. The systematic development of joining methods is necessary to overcome the metallurgical and thermal incompatibility of steel/aluminium or steel/fibre-reinforced plastic combinations. This paper presents two innovative and highly productive joining technologies and characterizes these processes based on their technological properties for one specific steel/aluminium material combination.