Prediction and Verification of Resistance Spot Welding Results of Ultra-High Strength Steels through FE Simulations

Abstract

Resistance spot welding (RSW) is the most common welding method in automotive engineering due to its low cost and high ability of automation. However, physical weldability testing is costly, time consuming and dependent of supplies of material and equipment. Finite Element (FE) simulations have been utilized to understand, verify and optimize manufacturing processes more efficiently. The present work aims to verify the capability of FE models for the RSW process by comparing simulation results to physical experiments for materials used in automotive production, with yield strengths from approximately 280 MPa to more than 1500 MPa. Previous research has mainly focused on lower strength materials. The physical weld results were assessed using destructive testing and an analysis of expulsion limits was also carried out. Extensive new determination of material data was carried out. The material data analysis was based on physical testing of material specimens, material simulation and comparison to data from literature. The study showed good agreement between simulations and physical testing. The mean absolute error of weld nugget size was 0.68 mm and the mean absolute error of expulsion limit was 1.10 kA.

Semantic Modeling, Development and Evaluation for the Resistance Spot Welding Industry

“…I NDUSTRY 4.0 refers to a series of profound changes towards high degree of inter-connectivity and smart manufacturing, involving large volume and variety of data in various industries [1], such as automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, etc. Resistance Spot Welding (RSW) is an automated manufacturing process widely applied for joining metal materials in these industries [2]. Worldwide RSW accounts for the production of over million of cars every year [3].…”

“…To address the above issues, this paper presents a RSW ontology (RSWO) that is developed based on and assessed on the industrial scenario at Bosch. RSWO combines knowledge from three sources: knowledge acquired from experts working with Bosch; the concepts are aligned with ISO-14327 and ISO-14373 2 that is under practice in the Bosch welding 1 We briefly introduce ontology here and refer the readers to [4], [5]. In essence, an ontology is a formal specification of a domain of interest to describe a set of concepts (e.g., WeldingMachine, WeldingElectrode) and the relations between these concepts (e.g., etc ).…”

“…Reasoning over ontologies allows to compute logical entailment. 2 We are aware that there are other relevant standards (e.g.,BS 1140, AWS C1.1M/C1. 1:2000, etc., but the welding standards are subject to inconsistency/contradictions of terminologies/definitions between the standards [12].…”

The Effects of Resistance Spot Welding Parameters on the Mechanical Behavior of Stainless Steel

“…Many RSW studies showed that the formation of nuggets in any welded material depends on the optimized combination of parameters [4][5][6][7]. Weld quality is affected by several welding parameters: current intensity, welding time, force applied by the electrodes, contact resistance, and electrode size [8].…”

Preventing nugget shifting in joining of dissimilar steels via resistance element welding: a numerical simulation

“…RSW is widely used for joining metallic materials in various industries due to its low cost and highly automated [7]. RSW uses the thermal effect of resistance generated by current flowing through the contact surface and adjacent areas of the workpieces to heat it to a molten or plastic state and then form a metal bond.…”