Smart Process Combination for Aluminum/Plastic Hybrid Components

Abstract

The research on lightweight construction increasingly gains in importance, especially for the automotive industry. New lightweight components ensure the necessary stability of car body parts on the one hand. On the other hand they are supposed to allow a low priced production. Hence, aluminum or magnesium alloys have quite a large share in production engineering. During the last years, research mainly addressed metal/plastic compounds. Weight reduction as well as the capability of producing complex structures are only some of the benefits of this technology. Furthermore, additional functionality can be integrated or functional tasks can be distributed: The metal ensures stiffness and realizes the technical connection to the car body by means of welding, while the plastic enables the insertion of special elements for the joining or assembly process. This paper presents two approaches of realizing a combined process to produce aluminum/plastic-hybrid structures. In a first approach, an active tool is presented to realize the sheet based process. The second approach focusses on the tube-based process and presents the topical state of research within the Federal Cluster of Excellence EXC 1075 “Merge Technologies for Multifunctional Lightweight Structures”.