Comparison of RSW technologies on DP steels with modified instrumented Charpy impact test

In recent decades the toughness of welded structures becomes more and more important. This trend is particularly valid for the advanced high-strength steels (AHSS), which have reduced toughness comparing to the low-strength structural steels. Dynamic characteristics of the welded joints of the newly developed high-strength steel sheets required by the automotive industry have been neglected, with welding procedures being optimized on the static joint properties, mainly on the tensile-shear force. Up to the present time, testing of dynamic properties of the spot-welded joints has been performed by increased testing speed during tensile testing. The authors have developed a new dynamic testing method and designed new testing equipment for impact bending, which can give a numeric result to characterize the resistance of spot-welded joints against dynamic load. In this paper, this method will be used to evaluate resistance spot-welded joints made on DP600 and DP800 steels with three different technological parameters, comparing long-time welding, short-time welding, and two-pulse welding. The different parameters cause different weld nugget sizes, failure modes, impact energies, and force–time diagrams. All test results show that bigger weld nugget diameters cause better impact energies and impact forces, but the differences are not perfectly correlated.