Joining of Advanced High Strength Steels for the Automotive Industry

Dear Colleagues,

Advanced High Strength Steels (AHSSs) are increasingly used for the fabrication of more lightweight, mechanical and impact resistant components. Superior performance allows to improve passenger safety (i.e. crashworthiness), reduce fuel consumption and gas emissions. However, even though fusion (e.g. arc, laser, spot welding) and solid-state (e.g. friction welding, riveting, clinching, fastening) technologies offer a notable flexibility in designing tailored multi-material parts for specific purposes, joining of AHSSs usually needs a different approach than that used for traditional steels. In this regard, fusion weldments of AHSSs normally exhibit a much lower mechanical strength and toughness as compared to the base materials. Differently, solid-state joining suffers mainly from the difficulty to deform plastically high resistant steels to realize joints. In addition, crack formation, shrinkage porosity, residual stresses, corrosion phenomena are more critical in AHSSs. To limit or overcome these issues, different promising solutions have been proposed such as optimized chemical compositions, hybrid welding, automated welding controls, pre- and post-heat treatments, new patented joining technologies and so on. However, they are often unreliable enough to allow an effective integration on a broad scale and some issues still remain unsolved.

Investment in research and development of AHSSs joining has great potential to boost manufacturing competitiveness in the automotive industry. Therefore, this Special Issue aims at collecting the most recent developments in joining of these steels covering several aspects such as fusion welding, solid-state and mechanical joining, microstructure-property relationships of joints, welding and forming of tailor welded blanks, welding control and automation, joining modeling and FEM simulation, welding metallurgy, corrosion phenomena, protective coatings.

Dr. Pasquale Russo Spena
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Metals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.