TY - JOUR A1 - Brauser, Stephan A1 - Rethmeier, Michael A1 - Pepke, Lutz-Alexander A1 - Weber, Gert T1 - Influence of production-related gaps on strength properties and deformation behaviour of spot welded trip steel HCT690T JF - Welding in the world N2 - In this study, the influence of production-related gaps on the shear tension strength and fatigue performance was investigated for resistance spot welded TRIP steel HCT690. Furthermore, the local strain distribution in shear tension test was calculated by the digital image correlation technique (DIC). The static shear tension strength was found to be almost independent of gaps up to 3 mm. The maximum local strain in the spot weld region however decreases depending on which sample side (deformed or undeformed) is considered. In addition, it has been ascertained that gaps of 3 mm lead to a significant drop in fatigue life compared to gap-free shear tension samples. This fact could be attributed to decreased stiffness, higher transverse vibration and higher rotation (θ) between the sheets as well as increased local stress calculated by 2 dimensional FE simulation. KW - Deformation KW - Fatigue life KW - Finite element analysis KW - Gap KW - Resistance spot welding KW - Shear strength PY - 2012 SN - 0043-2288 SN - 1878-6669 VL - 56 IS - 03-04 SP - 115 EP - 125 PB - Springer CY - Oxford AN - OPUS4-27590 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -