Impact of the Manufacturing Process on the Flexural Properties of Laminated Composite-Metal Riveted Joints: Experimental and Numerical Studies

The main aim of this paper was to make rivet joints of metal-composites without drilling the laminated composites. Experimental and numerical approaches were used to show the efficiency of this manufacturing method and its effects on the energy absorption of the metal-composites joint under bending loading. In this research, E-glass/epoxy laminated composites were joined to Al 6061-T6 and ASTM A283 St Grade C. Various number of rivets, i.e., 1, 2 and 4, and two arrangements, i.e., square and diamond, were embedded in the laminated composites. Then, the single lap joints were tested under flexural loading. A 3D finite element (FE) analysis at the meso-scale was performed to compare the response of woven E-glass/epoxy composites with and without drilling. Since the meso-scale model could not be applied to simulate the considered single lap joint, a refined micro-blocks model was also proposed for the regions affected by the riveting process. The experimental results showed that the embedding method significantly improves the energy absorption of the joints. This improvement was around 15% and 28–62% for the Al/composites and St/composites samples, respectively. Besides, the samples with the diamond arrangement have the best flexural properties. The FE analysis demonstrated that the results obtained by the refined micro-blocks model compare well with the experimental data.