Research advances in fatigue behaviour of clinched joints

In order to meet the increasingly stringent emission standards, a wide variety of lightweight materials are accounting for an increasing proportion in the white-body of vehicle. Many new joining technologies have been developed to connect these lightweight materials. Mechanical clinching is an effective alternative technique to join similar and dissimilar lightweight materials, which has been widely used in automotive industry. Understanding the fatigue properties of clinched joints is extremely significant as fatigue is the dominant failure mode in engineering practice. This paper provides a systematic review on the research progress of fatigue behaviour of clinched joints, including fatigue strength, failure mechanism, influencing factors, and life estimation model. It has been found that clinched joints performed superior fatigue resistance than traditional welding joints, and the failure modes were divided into neck fracture, bottom pull-out, upper sheet fracture, and lower sheet fracture. The recent development of fatigue life estimation model is described with brief case study from the literature. In short, the main purpose of the present article is to figure out the development roadmap of fatigue behaviour investigation of clinched joints and provide some suggestions for further study.