Joint Strength and Failure Mode of Steel/Aluminum Dissimilar Materials Joint Used in Automobile Body Assembly

Aluminum alloys have been proved to be the most acceptable material for weight reduction for automobile bodies. Therefore the process to join aluminum alloys to the traditional material such as low carbon steel has to be developed in vehicle body assembly. The methods to join aluminum alloy to steel material,including arc welding/brazing, laser welding, resistance spot welding, and friction stir welding,were collected and discussed in the paper. To help the designer to estimate the joint strength of various methods,the joint strengths and failure modes of steel/Al dissimilar materials joint under static tensile loading were focused on. Moreover,the trend of the joining method for dissimilar materials is also discussed.