Semi-Solid Joining of Aluminium and Carbon Fabric

In the context of today's lightweight design, an innovative joining technique was developed at the Institute for Metal Forming Technology/Stuttgart for combining aluminium sheets and carbon fabrics. Two aluminium sheets with a carbon fabric in-between are conductively heated by two electrodes up to the semi-solid state, so the woven carbon fabric is infiltrated with aluminium. The issue of the research work reported about in this paper is the infiltration of carbon multilayers and the numerical modelling for predicting the heating process time (finite element analysis). Thus, this paper shall contribute to the development of innovative hybrid structures in multi-material designs.