Robust optimization and quality control in spot welded structures Q. I. Bhatti and M. Ouisse and S. Cogan Abstract The performance characteristics (i.e., static, dynamic, crash, etc.) of a spot welded structure are strongly influenced by the number and the locations of the resistance spot welds. The design problem requires the number and locations of spot welds to be optimized so as to obtain reasonable trade-offs between manufacturing costs and structural performances. An optimization procedure is proposed which iteratively adds and removes spot welds in order to correct for approximations made in the iterative process. Moreover, a robustness indicator is formulated that allows to analyze the impact of the number of defective or broken spot welds on the system performance. This indicator provides a useful decision making tool for deciding both how many spot welds should be inspected following assembly as well as pointing to a small number of critical spot welds that should be reinforced. The proposed methodology will be illustrated on a full body-in-white structure. 1 Introduction Resistance spot welding is one of the main manufacturing techniques for sheet metal structures and the automotive industry, for example, uses thousands of resistance spot welds (abbreviated RSW or spot weld) to assemble the body-in-white (BIW) for vehicles. Meanwhile, global competition pushes the automotive industry to reQ. I. Bhatti FEMTO-ST Applied Mechanics, University of Franche-Comté, 24, rue de l’épitaphe, 25000 Besançon - France, e-mail: qamar.bhatti@femto-st.fr M. Ouisse sançon - France, e-mail: morvan.ouisse@univ-fcomte.fr S. Cogan FEMTO-ST Applied Mechanics, University of Franche-Comté, 24, rue de l’épitaphe, 25000 Besançon - France, e-mail: scott.cogan@univ-fcomte.fr T. Proulx (ed.), Linking Models and Experiments, Volume 2, Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series 5, 297 FEMTO-ST Applied Mechanics, University of Franche-Comté, 24, rue de l’épitaphe, 25000 BeDOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-9305-2_21, © The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc. 2011
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