The automotive manufactures increase their use of lightweight materials to improve fuel economy and energy usage has a significant influence on the choice of developing materials. To meet this requirements manufacturers are replacing individual body parts with lightweight metals, for these the process treating and painting surfaces is changing. The pre-coated steels are newly developed to avoid the conventional complex and non-environmental painting process in the body-in-white car manufacturing. The development of new joining techniques is critically needed for pre-coated steel sheets, which are electrically non-conductive materials. In the present study, dissimilar combination of pre-coated steel and galvanized steel sheets were joined by the self-piercing rivet, adhesive bonding and hybrid joining techniques. The tensile shear test and free falling high speed crash test were conducted to evaluate the mechanical properties of the joints. The highest tensile peak load with large deformation was observed for the hybrid joining process which has attained 48% higher than the self-piercing rivet. Moreover, the hybrid and adhesive joints were observed better strain energy compared to self-piercing rivet. The fractography analyses were revealed that the mixed mode of cohesive and interfacial fracture for both the hybrid and adhesive bonding joints.
Epoxy adhesives, particularly for non-conductive pastes, are used in 3D chip-stack flip-chip packages to reinforce the mechanical strength of joints. Although the thickness of the adhesive layer is relatively small, its thermal conductivity is known to have a major effect on the heat dissipation behavior of chipstack packages. Because conventional thermal conductivity measurement methods such as the laser flash method are based on the bulk specimens having thicknesses greater than several mm, they are limited in their ability to measure the thermal conductivity of thin adhesive layers between silicon dies. In this study, a modified guarded hot-plate method is proposed using standard joint layer samples of known thermal conductivity, and the measurement results are compared with those of the laser flash method. Results showed that, based on a constant heat flux from heat source to heat sink, the temperature difference at both sides of the joint layers was proportional to the thermal resistivity of the joint layer materials. The thermal conductivity of the under-test joint layer could therefore be determined from the thermal conductivity spectrum of the known samples using a graphical method. Although the measured values by the modified guarded hot-plate method were slightly higher than those derived from the laser flash method due to the thickness effect, it was concluded that the modified guarded hot-plate method could be a practical method in measuring the thermal conductivity of thin adhesive joint layers.