Despite their significant weight reduction potential, application and implementation in series production remains challenging for sandwich structures. Currently, the lack of suitable joining concepts is one of the main reasons hindering these innovative composite materials to be applied in industrial largescale production.
In the research project “Development of spot joining concepts and design strategies for innovative, structurally load-bearing sandwich structure “ – short PuVerSand – various joining concepts for sandwich structures are being investigated. The project PuVerSand aims at transferring spot and detachable joining technologies or elements to sandwich structures adequately, optimizing the overall composite system in terms of design, calculation, simulation and manufacturing processes, and thus, enabling the exploitation of the enormous lightweight potential of this material group in many application and industry fields.
Funded by the Ministry of Finance and Economics of Baden-Württemberg, the Fraunhofer Institutes for High-Speed Dynamics (EMI) and for Mechanics of Materials (WMI) in Freiburg as well as the Natural and Medical Sciences Institute (NMI) at the University of Tübingen cooperate in this project under the direction of the research area Lightweight and Hybrid Design Methods of the Institute. The participating industry partners EJOT GmbH & Co. KG, SIKA Deutschland GmbH, SECAM Fixing Solutions, DYNAmore GmbH and Hymer GmbH & Co. KG contribute to the success of the project by providing test specimen and through their advisory function. Moreover, PuVerSand is supported by the Leichtbau BW GmbH and rooted as associated project in the research campus ARENA2036.