Effect of Stainless Steel Mesh Structural Parameters on the Temperature Field and Joint Tensile-Shear Performance in CF/PC Resistance Welding

TL;DR

This study explores how the structure of stainless steel mesh affects the temperature and strength of carbon fiber-reinforced polycarbonate joints during resistance welding.

Contribution

A novel mesh design with variable aperture sizes improves temperature uniformity and joint strength in resistance welding of CCF/PC sheets.

Findings

A finite element model accurately predicts welding temperatures with 1–4% error compared to experiments.

Reducing clamping distance improves temperature uniformity and reduces edge overheating.

The novel mesh design increases joint tensile-shear force by 13.1% under optimized welding parameters.

Abstract

This study employs 304 stainless steel perforated mesh (SS mesh) as the heating element for the resistance welding of continuous carbon fiber-reinforced polycarbonate (CCF/PC) sheets. An electro-thermal coupled finite element model is developed to investigate the effect of SS mesh structural parameters (aperture shape, aperture area, mesh thickness) and clamping distance on the welding temperature field. The model accurately predicts peak temperatures, with errors of 1–4% compared with experiments. Under identical aperture area, the SS mesh with longer effective current path length and smaller effective cross-sectional area has higher resistance. In addition, the resistance increases significantly with decreasing mesh thickness and increasing aperture size. Reducing the clamping distance effectively improves temperature uniformity across the weld zone and mitigates edge overheating. A novel mesh structure—featuring larger aperture in the welding region and smaller aperture in non-welding region, is designed to improve the temperature uniformity and joint quality. Under optimized welding parameters (14 A, 40 s welding/holding, 0.3 MPa), the joint achieves a maximum tensile shear force of 9.851 kN, a 13.1% improvement over conventional uniform-aperture mesh (8.713 kN).

Figures