Single-sided piercing riveting for adhesive bonding in vehicle body assembly

Abstract

With increasing use of advanced high strength, lightweight materials and alternative vehicle architectures, materials joining issues have become increasingly important in automotive vehicle body assembly. Among the various joining methods, adhesive bonding is one of the important techniques for joining dissimilar materials in vehicle body assembly. During curing of the adhesive, it is necessary to fix and control the gap between the sheet panels to ensure the bonding strength and geometric quality. In this paper, a novel process, the single-sided piercing riveting (SSPR), is proposed for fixing and controlling the gap between the sheet panels during adhesive bonding of vehicle body assembly. The SSPR is a cold forming process for joining two or more sheet parts by driving a specifically designed U-shaped rivet using an impact force. The SSPR process is easy and convenient to implement without the need of a direct back support, and can meet the limited space requirement of vehicle body assembly. Joining experiments and performance tests were carried out to validate the effectiveness of the SSPR process. Performance comparison with other joining methods shows that mechanical properties of the lap-shear SSPR-bonded joints are superior to that of the SPR and SPR-bonded lap-shear joints.