A Tuesday article in Advanced Manufacturing offers a great macro-level overview of automotive lightweighting at the OEM level — the kind of trends that directly affect how collision repairers fix vehicles and what gear and training owners and techs need.
The magazine’s coverage describes some of the steel and aluminum vehicle developments affecting shops, and it offers a look at an intriguing new joining method out of Ohio State:
Ohio State University (Columbus, OH) is studying “civilized explosive welding” as a way to join dissimilar materials and avoid corrosion.
With the process, a thunderbolt rams one material into another to create a welded joint.
“It’s an early stage technology we’re committed to,” Glenn Daehn, professor of metallurgical engineering for the university, said in February at the Lightweight Vehicle Manufacturing Summit in Detroit.
“We think this is the best way to join advanced or dissimilar materials,” Daehn said at the conference.
Read the Advanced Manufacturing piece, and then take a deeper dive into some of the models described with our vehicle-specific coverage.
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