Influence of the Joining Force on the Nugget Diameter During Resistance Spot Welding of Aluminum Materials

Abstract

AbstractEver new requirements for the environmental compatibility and safety of products do not stop at the automotive industry. This results in ever shorter time windows for the pre-series processes. For this reason, time-consuming preliminary tests must be minimized to ensure an accelerated start-up and production that is as trouble-free as possible. This maxim applies to all parts of the production of an automobile, but especially to the body shop, where just-in-time production has been the norm for years and any downtimes are particularly severe. In order to meet these requirements, it is advantageous to understand or predict the result of a production process as well as possible.This paper deals with resistance spot welding of aluminum and aims to generate knowledge about the relationship between setting parameters and target value. Since resistance spot welding has a large number of setting parameters and a comprehensive investigation of these would go beyond the scope of this study, the focus is on the joining force and the features to be generated from it. The target parameter is the nugget diameter of the joining points. The data are determined experimentally and evaluated with the help of Machine Learning (ML) approaches. The correlations are presented in graphical form. The quantification of the influence of the joining force on the nugget diameter is expected to lead to a reduction of tests and thus to a gain in time.