Joining with Friction Spun Joint Connectors – Manufacturing and Analysis

Nowadays, the production of modern lightweight structures, like a body in white structure requires a wide variety of mechanical joining processes. To fulfill the various demands, mechanical joining processes and joining elements (JE) are used. Very often, they are adapted to the application, which leads in turn to a numerous of different variants, high costs, and loss of the process chain versatility. To overcome this drawback, an innovative approach is the usage of individually produced and task-adapted JE, the so-called friction spun joint connectors (FSJC). These connectors can be modified in shape as well as in material properties. This flexibility offers high potential for lightweight design but also increases the necessary analytical effort regarding the forming process as well as the manufactured joint's properties. Therefore, a new analysis strategy based on the Finite-Element-Method (FEM) is proposed, which numerically determines the local load bearing capacity within a given joint in order to identify the critical regions for load transfer. The process of joining element manufacturing and the analysis strategy will be described in detail and optimization results of the joints are shown. Numerical results are discussed and possible recommendations for joint manufacturing are derived.