“…The necessity for joints between dissimilar materials often arises in functionally complex industrial applications, economic and environmental concerns (Torkamany et al, 2010;Guo et al, 2014;Liu et al, 2015). For instance, the combination of steel with aluminum provides fuel-efficiency by reducing the weight of construction (Miller et al, 2000;Torkamany et al, 2010;Ahsan et al, 2016). One of the major challenges in transportation vehicle manufacturing is the joining of aluminum and steel by conventional fusion welding methods due to the large difference between their physical and chemical properties (Cao et al, 2014a ;Guo et al, 2014;Squires et al, 2015).…”