JOINING TECHNIQUES

An essential ingredient of any multimaterial is a joining method or methods, to either construct the material itself or to connect one material to another. Examples can be honeycomb to skin for a sandwich structure, or a dissimilar connection between a polymer composite and metal. For the purposes of this project, the area of dissimilar metal joining has been mostly disregarded and the topic has focused towards multimaterial systems of very different properties; i.e. families of polymer, metal, honeycomb, ceramic, wood etc joined to each other. This in turn has led to a focus on adhesive bonding and mechanical fastening, as the prime joining methods.