Systemic Assessment and Selection of Material and Joining Technology Exemplarily Applied on the Automotive Bodywork

Abstract

Due to the increasingly stringent environmental regulations for more sustainable products and processes, as well as the enhanced pressure on competition and costs, in particular the automotive industry is currently facing various challenges. The trend towards a system-efficient lightweight engineering is one solution that leads to the future-oriented concept of multi-material design and its growing variety of heterogeneous combinations of materials and possible joining technologies. However, such a systemically even more necessitated inherent consideration of certain material/joining-correlations causes a highly complex, multi-dimensional decision-making on component and subsystem level, which has not been investigated sufficiently in the scientific literature yet. Thus, this research work provides a multi-criteria (technically, economically and ecologically oriented) approach to an integrated cross-component material and joining concept evaluation supporting the concurrent decision-making in the early phase of product development. Here, and apart from the individual view on a functional, economic and sustainable joining of different material combinations, the overall methodology works with a set-based choice of alternative solutions ultimately to detect a holistic optimum with respect to the full assembly line with its material throughput, utilization rates, and cycle times of the needed joining systems in one subassembly step. Based on the detailed scientific considerations, an example from the automotive industry is applied to validate the usability of the prototypically software-supported procedure in an industrial context for a future multistage potential analysis.