Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Clinched Joints Under Shear Tensile Loading at High Strain Rates

In the development of innovative lightweight solutions in automotive engineering, the use of the mechanical joining technique clinching offers the possibility of joining mixed structures with a wide range of requirement profiles. In order to be able to predict the material failure behavior of clinched structures under crash-like scenarios and to design components accordingly, investigations of the load-bearing behavior of clinched joints under high strain rate loading are necessary. For this reason, shear tensile tests on clinched joints under impact load application are to be carried out and evaluated with regard to their load-bearing capacities within the scope of this work using the aluminum alloy EN AW-6014 T4. In addition, the influence of plastic preforming of the parts to be joined is investigated. Furthermore, corresponding numerical investigations are carried out, for which the strain rate dependency of the material's plasticity is first characterized experimentally and implemented in the material model. Subsequently, the experimentally and numerically determined load-bearing capacities of the clinched joints are compared and discussed.