Self-Piercing Riveting of Metal Foam Sandwich Structures

抄録

Metal foam sandwich structures are widely used in construction and transportation fields because of their good acoustic performance, high thermal stability, lightweight, and high stiffness. This paper deals with join-ability of self-piercing riveted metal foam sandwich structures. Self-piercing riveting tests were performed on AA5052 aluminium alloy sandwich structures embedded with different metal foams. Tensile-shear tests were conducted to characterize the mechanical properties of different self-piercing riveted metal foam sandwich structures. The results illustrate that the connection of metal foam sandwich structures can be effectively realised with the self-piercing riveting technique. The joints exhibit good forming quality and mechanical performance. For metal foam sandwich joints, the sandwich structures embedded with nickel foam exhibits the best mechanical properties. The failure modes of the self-piercing riveted sandwich structures were observed at the separation of the lower sheets and rivet.

Fig. 5 Cross-section of SPR metal foam sandwich structures.