An improved model for dissipation in welding spot joints

The understanding of the physical phenomena associated with energy dissipation in automobile structures and modelling them accurately in dynamic analysis is important. These structures are constituted of steel shells connected by several thousands of welding spots. The vibration damping associated with this kind of structures is mostly localised in joints by contact/friction. In this paper, we present a new model for friction dissipation in welding spot joints which takes into account the contact pressure distribution in the assembling neighbourhood. Numerical simulations on a test structure are presented to evaluate the model performance. The encouraging results show, in particular, the influence of contact pressures on the damping property of the joint.