Weight reduction is one of the main objectives that has played a pivotal role in designing Automobiles in the past decades. Various methods can be employed in this direction such as replacing traditional steel with lightweight aluminum alloys or using a combination of multiple lightweight materials. Joining techniques like spot welding, which generally perform well for joining of steel body panels, do not yield satisfactory results in joining of aluminum sheets. Consequently, there has been an increasing interest in developing alternative joining techniques as a replacement for spot welding in the automotive industry.
Ships and offshore structures operating in areas such as the Arctic have to be designed to withstand ice induced loads, e.g. from ice floe impact. This is mostly done with empirical methods, which have several drawbacks, e.g. they only give upper estimates of global loads. Numerical simulations of ice interaction are a desirable remedy, but their accuracy is currently limited if the material model doesn’t account for fracture processes. One approach is to use an elastic bulk material model along with the cohesive zone method (CZM) to model all inelastic deformation, i.e. fracture. Here, this approach is applied to simulate tensile splitting tests. The focus is on parameter identification and numerical instabilities for fine discretizations.
Modelling of adhesively bonded joints is still an active field of research, aiming for a more accurate description and simpler calibration processes without significant increase in computational costs. There are two different approaches typically applied to model adhesives depending on the size of the problem and required accuracy. For smaller problems where the computational cost is of less relevance, the adhesive line can be finely discretized and modelled with a mesoscopic material model. This mesoscopic model is characterized by a constitutive law describing the relation between stresses and strains in the material.
Simulation of Self-Piercing Riveting Process and Joint Failure with Focus on Material Damage and Failure Modelling