Fatigue behavior and modeling of self-piercing riveted joints in aluminum alloy 6111

The fatigue behavior of self-piercing riveted (SPR) joints of aluminum alloy 6111-T4 has been experimentally and numerically investigated in current study. The dominant fatigue failure mode under tensile-shear (TS) loading is the corner crack at riveted hole with approximate quarter-elliptical crack front, and interrupted tests revealed that the crack growth life was much shorter than crack initiation life. A fatigue parameter, Smith-Watson-Topper (SWT) was proposed for crack initiation prediction in the 3D finite element analysis, while a structural load based crack growth approach was introduced for crack growth life estimation. Good agreement was found between predictions and experimental results.