Sensitivity Study of Self-Piercing Rivet Insertion Process Using Smoothed Particle Galerkin Method

Self-piercing rivets (SPR) are efficient and economical joining elements for automotive body structures manufacturing. The Smoothed Particle Galerkin Method has been initially proven as a potentially effective way to assess the SPR joining process. However, uncertain CAE parameters could result in significant mismatches between the CAE predictions and physical tests, and therefore the sensitivity study on critical model parameters is important to guide the modeling of the SPR insertion process. In this paper, a meshfree, i.e., Smoothed Particle Galerkin (SPG), method was applied to the simulation of the SPR insertion process with LSDYNA®/explicit. The severely deformed upper sheet was modeled using the SPG method with activated bond failure, while the rest of the model was modeled using the traditional finite element approach. An extensive sensitivity study is conducted to understand the effect of a set of model parameters. This work provides a foundation for CAE model calibration for the SPR insertion process using SPG.