Clinching in In-situ CT – Experimental Study on Suitable Tool Materials Köhler, Daniel Kupfer, Robert Troschitz, Juliane Gude, Maik <jats:p>In lightweight design, clinching is a cost-efficient solution as the joint is created through localized cold-forming of the joining parts. A clinch point’s quality is usually assessed using ex-situ destructive testing methods. These, however, are unable to detect phenomena immediately during the joining process. For instance, elastic deformations reverse and cracks close after unloading. In-situ methods such as the force-displacement evaluation are used to control a clinching process, though deviations in the clinch point geometry cannot be derived with this method. To overcome these limitations, the clinching process can be investigated using in-situ computed tomography (in-situ CT). However, a clinching tool made of steel would cause strong artefacts and a high attenuation in the CT measurement, reducing the significance of this method. Additionally, when joining parts of the same material, the sheet-sheet interface is hardly detectable. This work aims at identifying, firstly, tool materials that allow artefact-reduced CT measurements during clinching, and, secondly, radiopaque materials that can be applied between the joining parts to enhance the detectability of the sheet-sheet interface. Therefore, both CT-suitable tool materials and radiopaque materials are selected and experimentally investigated. In the clinching process, two aluminium sheets with radiopaque material in between are clinched in a single-step (rotationally symmetric joint without cut section). It is shown that e.g. silicon nitride is suited as tool material and a tin layer is suitable to enhance the detectability of the sheet-sheet interface.</jats:p> University of Liege 2021 info:eu-repo/semantics/article doc-type:article text http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501 https://ris.uni-paderborn.de/record/51201 Köhler D, Kupfer R, Troschitz J, Gude M. Clinching in In-situ CT – Experimental Study on Suitable Tool Materials. <i>ESAFORM 2021</i>. Published online 2021. doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.25518/esaform21.2781">10.25518/esaform21.2781</a> fra info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.25518/esaform21.2781 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/418701707 info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess