Assembly Distortion Engineering

In the automotive industry, body components are often assembled together through a spot welding process. As the manufactured (single) parts are generally not identical to their nominal/designed shapes due to the manufacturing process, during the assembly process small gaps need to be closed by clamps and/or weld robots, which will introduce small elastic deformations.

After joining the components together these elastic distortions, in combination with the local heat effect of the spot welds, could result in the final body structure to be out of specifications. Correction during physical try-out is a very common procedure, but relies on the availability of the assembly line and is highly time-consuming and very costly, as all hardware is already manufactured.

Using ESI’s ASSEMBLY solution allows you, in all stages of the assembly process engineering cycle, to verify the resulting distortions and investigate the effectiveness of applied countermeasures like changing the number or location of clamps, the clamp and weld sequence, pre-deformation and much more. Ultimately, feedback can be given to the design & stamping departments, if a modification of a single part will result in an improved assembly quality, hence saving on reworking of die sets. 

Read more: Simulating Automotive Multi-Material Assemblies