Simulation of Self-Piercing Riveting Process in Aluminum Alloy 5754 Using Smoothed Particle Galerkin Method

Self-piercing riveting (SPR) are one of most important joining approaches in lightweight vehicle design for Body-in-white (BIW) manufacturing. Numerical simulation of the riveting process could significantly boost design efficiency by reducing trial-and-error experiments. The traditional Finite Element Method (FEM) with element erosion is hard to capture the large plastic deformation and complex failure behaviors in the SPR process. The smoothed Particle Galerkin Method (SPG) is a genuine meshless method based on Galerkin's weak form, which uses a novel bond-based failure mechanism to keep the conservation of mass and momentum during the material failure process. This study utilizes a combined FEM and SPG approach to join Aluminum sheet 5754 using a full three-dimensional (3D) model in LS-DYNA/explicit. To mimic the rivet insertion process, the mesh-free SPG method is used to model the material part of the upper and lower sheet where the rivet pierces through, while FEM methods for computational efficiency model the remaining parts. Sensitivity studies are conducted to investigate the impacts of critical model parameters and accurate material properties. This work illustrates that precise material properties and 3D CAE modeling can provide fundamental and insightful information for the SPR process.