An experimental investigation on the behaviour of self-piercing riveted connections in aluminium alloy AA6060

This paper presents an experimental study on the behaviour of self-piercing riveted connections in aluminium alloy AA6060 under quasi-static loading conditions. Factorial design is used in the planning of the experimental programme as well as in the results interpretation. The test specimens were made of two U-shaped plates joined in the centre by a single self-piercing rivet. The experimental programme is focused on the influence of important model parameters such as thickness of the plates, geometry of the specimens, material properties of the plates and loading conditions. The programme was divided into two parts. In the first part, a 23 factorial design was used to investigate the influence of the thickness, the material properties and the width of the specimens. In the second part, the interaction between the thickness and the material properties of the top and bottom plates on the response of the connections was investigated. The single-rivet specimens were tested under three different loading directions, i.e. 0 degrees (pure shear), 45 degrees and 90 degrees (pure pull-out) and a failure envelope, relating the normal and shear forces acting on the rivet, was generated. Furthermore, the applicability of the design rules in the European standard on cold-formed aluminium structures (prEN 1999-1-4) was evaluated. Finally, a three-dimensional numerical model of the single-rivet specimen was generated using the explicit finite element code LS-DYNA. From the numerical simulation, a failure criterion was generated and compared with the corresponding experimental curve.