Compliant assembly tolerance analysis: a simulation model for involving spot welding plastic effect

The variational analysis on compliant assembly has been shown to be significantly influenced by plastic deformation of the part’s material induced by resistance spot welding and fixturing. The aim of this paper is to introduce the FEM tools to improve such analysis and to organize the required information. The methods to simulate the thermal effects and the corresponding plastic deformations on shell models are here described and implemented into FEM routines to be used for the calculation of the influence coefficient matrixes, so to reduce the problem complexity. The methods applied on simple geometry are in good agreement with the previous, more detailed simulations obtained on models with solid elements. The tested methods can be applied to a variational analysis using the influence coefficient method and Monte Carlo simulation so to obtain a result more adherent to the phenomena occurring in the welding process.