Ecological and economic aspects nowadays increasingly require the development of weight‐reduced designs and energy‐efficient production processes. Particularly in the field of modern vehicle or aircraft construction, developers endeavour to take into account the ever more extensive customer requirements for safety and comfort by using lightweight construction. In many lightweight construction applications, alongside the classic material steel, plastics and the light metals aluminium, magnesium and titanium are being used. Due to a wide variety of requirements, the combination of different material classes to form hybrids will become even more important in the future. Injection moulding is an established method to join plastic‐metal hybrid components. In the present study, the potentials of electron beam structuring by means of surfi‐sculpt, an electron beam material processing technology, on different lightweight materials for the generation of form‐fit elements in plastic‐metal‐hybrid components to be used to join both materials by overmoulding are analysed. The analysis is performed by means of tensile shear test specimens.
AbstractThe combined deep drawing and back-moulding process shows great potential to reduce manufacturing costs of plastic/metal hybrids for structural components. To achieve this, a new mould technology with the components of both forming technologies is developed. By closing the mould, the inserted metal sheet is first deep drawn, and when the mould is fully closed, it is further formed by melt pressure. It can be shown that the forming quality of the second forming step mainly depends on the packing pressure. For a controlled flow of the metal, a downholder is necessary. By adjusting the downholder, force on the thinning of the metal through forming can be controlled.
In order to meet the high demands on tolerances and surface qualities, for example in automotive lighting applications, a hybrid part composed of a light metal (aluminium) and an amorphous thermoplastic (polycarbonate) could be an alternative to the established mono‐materials used today. Due to the lack of adhesion promoter systems for joining this specific material combination, a micro‐form‐fitted connection by creating undercut microstructures by laser ablation is used to achieve a full‐surface bond. First investigations are carried out to ensure the filling of these microstructures with different polycarbonate moulding compounds by over moulding in the injection moulding process. Subsequently, the influence of the moulding compound, the structure arrangement and the influence of a pickling treatment on the bond strength are analysed by tensile shear testing.
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