Abstract
This paper shows a stress evaluation method considering the variation of spot-weld location in automotive body. In order to represent stress perturbations caused by scattering of spot-weld locations, stochastic finite element method (SFEM) is adopted. First-order perturbation solution is used in SFEM to obtain not only deterministic responses but also these perturbations, in which the stiffness matrix including stochastic variables is considered. With this stochastic approach, stress distribution affected by location variables of each spot-weld could be easily obtained using the general-purpose FE solver.
