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Upset Protrusion Joining (UPJ) characteristics of cast AM60 magnesium alloy to join with dissimilar material

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Abstract

Magnesium alloys have a significant benefit over the steel and aluminum alloys in manufacturing of components for many automotive and structural applications because of their extreme lightweight, low density, and high strength to weight ratio. However, one of the glaring impediments to the success of steels, aluminum, and magnesium-based multi-material integration for automotive industries is the ability to join these materials together without any cracking and corrosive damages during a performance. The present work aims to demonstrate a cost-effective, novel, and versatile joining technique, named Upset Protrusion Joining (UPJ), to mechanically and rapidly (1–2 s) join die-cast AM60 alloy to aluminum alloy sheet and evaluate its UPJ characteristics. Cast Mg plate has a cylindrical protrusion (11 mm diameter and 14 mm height) emanated perpendicular to its flat surface, and an aluminum sheet has a hole that accommodates the protrusion. Mg and Al alloy components are then clamped together, electrically heated, and compressed perpendicular to the protrusion axis. During compression, the protrusion expanded circumferentially to fill the hole as well as the region above the hole, and entrapped the Al sheet between the deformed (in a mushroom shape) head and the Mg plate. The effect of different UPJ process parameters such as applied current, current duration, compression loading rate, and compression distance is studied. The process demonstrated repeatability at given process conditions, and optimum process parameters were identified that produce visibly good joints (defect-free) and sufficient joint strengths when tested in the lap-shear mode under uniaxial tension. AM60 alloy showed a great promise as a candidate alloy to suit the UPJ method to adapt to automotive and other industrial manufacturing units to join with dissimilar wrought Al alloy sheets.

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Data availability

The raw and processed data required to reproduce the present work’s findings cannot be shared at this time as the data also forms part of an ongoing study. Some data is available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr. Sumanth Shankar of McMaster University and Mr. Steve Logan of Fiat Chrysler Automotive (FCA) for their technical support and many discussions. The authors would also like to acknowledge the technical support Mr. Ron Lodewyks, Mr. Clealand Berwick, Mr. Joe Verhaeghe, Mr. Michal Lee, Mr. John Colenbrander, and Mr. Mark MacKenzie, all part of Faculty of Engineering at McMaster University, in the design and development of UPJ system.

Funding

This research was carried out and financially supported under the Automotive Partnership Canada (APC) program of Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada with Dr. Sumanth Shankar of Department of Mechanical Engineering, McMaster University, as Principal Investigator.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, L8S 4L7, Canada

    Nicholas Andreae, Dharmendra Chalasani & Mukesh Jain

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  1. Nicholas Andreae
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  2. Dharmendra Chalasani
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Contributions

N. Andreae: conceptualization; visualization; data curation; formal analysis; investigation; methodology; software; validation; writing—original draft. C. Dharmendra: investigation; writing—original draft. M.K. Jain: conceptualization; visualization; investigation; methodology; project administration; resources; supervision; writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Dharmendra Chalasani.

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Andreae, N., Chalasani, D. & Jain, M. Upset Protrusion Joining (UPJ) characteristics of cast AM60 magnesium alloy to join with dissimilar material. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 120, 329–348 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-021-08563-5

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