Combination of versatile self-piercing riveting processes

Due to economic and ecological framework conditions, a resource-saving utilization of raw materials and energy is becoming increasingly important in particular in the mobility sector. For the reduction of moving masses and the resources consumed, lightweight construction technologies are part of modern production processes in vehicle manufacturing, for example in the form of multi-material systems. Challenging in the manufacture of multi-material systems especially in view of changing supply chains is the variety of materials and geometries that bring conventional joining processes to their limits. Therefore, new processes are required, which can react versatile to process and disturbance variables. A widely used industrial joining process is semi-tubular self-piercing riveting, which is however a rigid process. To increase the versatility, the two newly established processes multi-range self-piercing riveting and tumbling self-piercing riveting are combined and the capabilities for targeted material flow control are united. Therefore, an innovative two-stage process based on the combination is introduced in this paper. The rivet is set with the multi-range self-piercing riveting process with an overlap of the rivet head and then formed by a tumbling process. Further, a specific adaptation of the tumbling strategy is used to investigate the possibility of reducing cracks in the rivet head. Thereby, different tumbling strategies are used and similar geometric joint formations are achieved to compare the results. </jats:p>