Experimental and numerical analysis of electrical contact crimping to predict mechanical strength

摘要

This work focuses on the modeling of the aeronautical electrical contact crimping process for aircraft applications. Several thousands of crimped contact can be found in an airplane or a helicopter. The crimping process has thus to be mastered precisely in order to avoid expensive repairing and dangerous configurations. Electrical crimping is a plastic deformation process of a contact (component) on a multi-strand wire. All components are highly deformed in order to impose mechanical contact and electrical continuity. The components are very small for the cases studied in this work (0.12 mm diameter wire or 1 mm diameter cylinders). The work has been divided in 3 main steps. First, material characterization is performed in order to identify behavior laws to feed numerical simulations. The challenge is to be able to deal with very small components. The second point is to build an accurate a numerical model of the crimping process. The numerical model is compared with experimental results. Validation is done comparing with both laboratory devices and real crimped assemblies. Finally mechanical strength is studied. The numerical model is used to verify the impact of components' dimensions or crimping condition on the mechanical resistance. Numerical models are also compared to experimental data.