Integrity of the resistance spot welds determines the overall structural rigidity and integrity of the mechanical system. The main mode of failure for spot-weld joints is fatigue fracture due to fluctuating loads. Resistance spot welds are of great importance to manufacturing industry, considering that it is a commonly used technique for joining thin-sheet components of metals. For example, car and bus bodies may contain thousands of spot welds. Besides economic aspects, spot-welded structures drive the development of optimization in the field of spot welds. Accordingly, the objective of this study is to develop a procedure to maximize the fatigue life or the load-carrying capacity of spot-weld joints by minimizing the maximum stress. In the optimization procedure, the material and size of the sheet plates are predetermined. On the other hand, the number and locations of the spot welds are chosen as design variables. In order to calculate the objective function, which is the maximum equivalent stress, ANSYS (version 9.0) finite-element analysis software is used. The procedure is applied to a representative problem to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
展开▼
