METAKLETT – A Metal Cocklebur

Abstract

The increasing individualization of products assigns manufacturing companies to new tasks like manufacturing various products in a more efficient way. This progression in the market leads on the one hand to a new product design and on the other hand to an improved production process. Both are necessary to reduce assembly, service and recycling costs. Hence the joining technology is and will become more and more important. The conventional joining technologies like welding, bonding, bolting or clamping have their own disadvantages especially in the field of flexibility. In order to reduce the effort for assembling and disassembling by retaining the requirements of the connection a new innovative joining technology is needed. In this study a new joining technology is introduced to become faster and more flexible in assembling and disassembling. The basic idea of this manufacturing technology comes from a “metal hook and loop fastener”. A hook and loop fastener consisting of metal has a lot of advantages for the fields of industrial assembly, service and recycling. Similar to the synthetic hook and loop fastener a metal one is characterized by easy closing and opening without special tools. And in comparison to the synthetic hook and loop fastener the transmissible forces are very high. An additional benefit can be gained for instance in shock absorbing or resistance against chemical and thermal influence. Two solutions are followed up to invent the “metal hook and loop fastener”. A one-to-one copy of the conventional hook and loop fastener is constructed in metal and specific solutions for the use of metal are tested. A conventional finite element program was used in order to optimize the construction of a metal cocklebur and the results show a good agreement with the experiment.