Current clinch-adhesive hybrid joints for steel-aluminum dissimilar materials face challenges of adhesive layer damage during forming and insufficient material flow due to limited ductility of cured adhesives. To address these issues, this paper proposes a warm clinch-adhesive joining technique to improve the forming quality of dissimilar steel-aluminum material joints. A temperature-dependent constitutive model was developed to characterize the mechanical responses of the epoxy adhesive Araldite®2015 at different temperatures. A finite element algorithm was implemented via the ABAQUS user-defined subroutine VUMAT. Three-dimensional finite element models were established to simulate the clinching process at four different temperatures: 25, 50, 65 and 80 ℃. By comparing the geometric parameters such as neck thickness, interlock depth and bottom thickness of the simulated and experimentally obtained joints, the reliability of the numerical model was validated with the errors controlled within 10%. The results showed that with the increasing temperature, the failure strain and plastic deformation capability of the adhesive layer improved, which facilitated sufficient plastic flow forming of the metal sheets and thereby enhanced the quality of the clinch-adhesive joints. Compared to that at 25 ℃, at a clinching temperature of 80 ℃, the interlock depth of the joint increased by 22.9%, and the failed area of the adhesive layer decreased by 38.31%. This work establishes a thermal modulation strategy that suppresses adhesive damage through ductility optimization, providing a validated methodology for high-quality dissimilar material joining in engineering applications.
Zhang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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