Carbon-fiber composites offer numerous benefits to automotive manufacturers, such as weight reduction. However, they pose a wide variety of joining challenges to engineers, who must choose between adhesive bonding or mechanical fastening. Each assembly process has many pros and cons that must be evaluated.
“Adhesives can bond almost any combination of materials and they produce a continuous bondline,” says George Ritter, principal material engineer at EWI, the leading North American authority on materials joining and applied technologies for the transportation industry. “This produces strong joints with good stress distribution.