Material specific developments of self-piercing riveting for highly loaded joints of sheet metals

In the last years self-piercing riveting was discovered as an innovative joining technique for the sheet fabricating industry and since then has been further developed. Beginning with the classification model and the manufacturing goals the self-piercing riveting with semi-tubular rivet ist presented. With this technology highly stable joints and reproducible joining results have been achieved. A condition for this is the optimization of the riveting parameters on the respective joining problem. In this work the rivet material optimization of the joining sheet material is presented. It turns out, that with the right choice of the river material also the high quality joining of difficult to weld materials is possible, as for example aluminium and stainless steel.