CRUSH CHARACTERISTICS OF ADHESIVELY BONDED COMPOSITE-ALUMINUM TUBES
Tubular members are used in the automotive industry for body, chassis, and powertrain components such as front rails, underbody frames or sub frames, driveshaft structures and space frames. They are also extensively used in buses and other heavy vehicle structures. With focus on light-weighting, there is increasing use of multimaterial structures with aluminum and high-performance composites. Joining a variety of materials with different characteristics and compositions is a major challenge for the design of such structures. Hence, adhesive bonding is emerging as one of the key joining technique for multi-material structures due to their compatibility with commonly used lightweight materials. Since tubular joints in automotive structures may experience crush type load, this study considers the crush characteristics of composite-aluminum tubular adhesive joints using finite element analysis.