Predicting the quality of clinch joints using FEM

In the last decade clinch joining has become established as a cost-effective alternative to spot welding. Its develompent was brought on by the ongoing trend towards lightweight structures especially in the automotive insdustry. Choosing the tool which gives the best performance for a newly developed structure is a time and cost consuming processbased on the principle of experiment. Numerical simulation early on in the design phase can reduce these costs. The simulation of the clinching process and the subsequent experiments to determine their static strength are presented in this paper. The results of experimenting for certain joints prove that their outcome is very well predicted.