LAUSR

Abstract More than 6000 cylindrical joining points connect the individual sheet metal components of a current car body. Due to multi-material design, a large number of these points are currently realized by bulk-sheet metal-forming processes, such as clinching or self-pierce riveting. Today, the development and optimization of joining points takes into account tensile, shear and combined tensile-shear strengths of the joint. Although a load-optimized design can be used to increase the utilization of the joining points and to reduce weight and costs, the design of the joining points themselves is not adapted to the actual local load, since their predominant load distributions are hardly known. The aim of this paper is to determine the probability distribution of pure tensile, shear and combined tensile-shear loads at joining points of a body-in-white under realistic global loads. First, a body model is derived from a full vehicle, then the joining points are modeled, and the global loads are applied to the structure. The simulation results are then automatically evaluated. This data-driven approach thus enables an automated determination of the cross-sectional forces at the joining points and their statistical evaluation for load-compliant joint point design in product development.