Science of Clinch–Adhesive Joints

The idea of “hybrid joints” arises from the need of joining together materials, producing a tough, stiff and lightweight joint. The core concept is: use two different joining techniques, with the aim to increase the strength and gather the advantages of each technique, reducing the drawbacks. This chapter is devoted to clinch–adhesive (also called clinchbonded) joints, which is of particular interest for the chassis manufacturing in vehicles (automotive, trucks, buses, railways) but also of the nautical and ropeways applications. First, an overview of clinching, adhesive bonding and clinch–adhesive joint characteristics is given. The experimental details and the design of experiments plan are then described and the result are shown and discussed comparing the performances in terms of stiffness, strength and energy absorption to failure of simple and hybrid joints. Since one of the most important needs of the industry is the possibility to simulate mechanical behavior of the joint up to failure, damage models have been applied to the finite element analysis of the simple and hybrid joints and the results are shown in the last paragraph.