TWI Industrial Member Report Summary 304/1986
R M Rivett and S T Riches
Scope
Research in the automotive industry has been motivated strongly by the desire to improve fuel economy, reduce production costs and maintain or increase passenger safety. This has resulted in the development of alternative materials such as high strength steels and Al alloys to replace low carbon steels and research into adhesively bonded and weldbonded sections to minimise production costs. All these materials and joining techniques must be capable of withstanding impact loads.
Many of the vehicle manufacturers have been involved in their own studies on the impact performance of box sections and practical results and models have been published. A review of this work is presented in this report. However, little work has been conducted on the influence of the joining technique (spot welding, weldbonding and adhesive bonding) on the impact properties of box sections. This report describes a programme of work which has investigated the impact properties of spot welded, weldbonded, and adhesively bonded box sections made from various steels of 1.2mm thickness and an Al alloy of 1.6mm thickness.