Sheet metal joining process selector

Abstract

Selecting the most suited manufacturing process for a specific product, as well as optimizing the design regarding manufacture and assembly, is actions that will directly impact on cost and quality, aiming at finding the best match between the product’s functional requirements and the attributes of the processes, and it should be carried out in the first stages of product development. In this context, the literature presents some sheet metal joining process selection methods, which can be classified as: mechanical (forming), metallurgical (welding) and chemical (adhesive) processes. However, such methods are complex and not specific for thin sheet metal. Therefore, our goal is to propose a joining process selector for overlapping sheet metal, which can correlate the product’s functional requirements with the technical characteristics of the processes (clinching, rivets and welding) in early stages of product development. Unlike what is found in the literature, this selector is subdivided into five different types of clinching processes. The selector design was based on the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) principle, which easily converts a product’s functional requirements into an ordered joining process list. The joining process data collection was carried out from two approaches: quantitative (joining sheet thickness, joint dimensions, production batch and joining strength) and qualitative (type of material, surface finish and accessibility to perform the joining). Three products were chosen to validate the selector. The results were compared against the literature and commonly commercially employed processes. The application of the selector in commercial products showed compatibility with the literature as well as the commercially used processes. However, depending on the product, other requirements might be considered, such as availability of equipment and production costs.

Appendix: Systematic literature review

The search was performed on June 2019, using SCOPUS database with the following features:

• Search string: “selection of joining methods”

• Search fields: Article Title, Abstract and Keywords

• Subject area/Language/Source/Publish year: all

This search resulted on seven documents, listed in Table 12, being the work of Lebacq et al. [21] the most cited of them. Among these documents, only two are published in the last 5 years.

Table 12 Results from the systematic literature review

As a second filter, it as performed the reading of the title and abstract. Papers numbered as 3 and 5 in Table 11 were considered out of scope, since they don’t seem to address the selection of joining process per se, in any level. Paper number 6 is out of the list too, since it addresses the joining of plastic parts. The work of Goslow (1967) was considered suitable for evaluation, but we didn’t have access of its contents, and consequently, was also removed from the list (paper #7). The remaining papers (1, 2 and 4) were selected for full reading.

Besides these filters, an additional endeavor was performed in evaluating the works that cited the paper of Lebacq et al. [21]. The full list (51 papers) passed by a refinement limiting the options with the following criteria:

• Subject area: Engineering; Materials Science

• Language: English

• Source type: Journals; Conference Proceedings

• Publish year: all

It resulted on 38 documents, which passed through a more detailed reading of title and abstract. The seven remaining results are listed in Table 13. Among these papers, we didn’t have access just to document number 5 and the paper of Mesa et al. [25] was already on the previous list (paper number 3). The remaining papers were selected for full reading.

Table 13 Papers citing Lebacq et al. [21] in SCOPUS database