Fatigue Failure Modes in Self-Piercing Riveted Aluminium Alloy Joints

Self-piercing riveting, as an alternative joining method to spot-welding, has attracted considerable interest from the automotive industry and has been widely used in aluminium intensive vehicles. One of the important factors that need to be considered is the effect of cyclic loading in service, leading to possible fatigue failure. The previous work reported in the public domain on the behaviour of self-piercing rivets has mainly focused on static tests. The work which is reported in this paper is concerned with the fatigue behaviour of single-rivet joints, joining two 2mm 5754 aluminium alloy sheets. The investigation also examined the effect of interfacial conditions on the fatigue behaviour. A number of fatigue failure mechanisms were observed based on rivet fracture, sheet fracture and combinations of these. The investigation has shown that they were dependent on the applied load and the sheet surface condition. Three-parameter Weibull analysis, using Reliasoft Weibull ++5.0 software, was conducted to analyse the experimental results. The analysis enabled the prediction of early-type failure (infant mortality failure) and wear-out failure patterns depending on the condition of the self-piercing riveted joints and the alloy sheet surface.