Alke' is industrial partner of JOIN'EM project. Objective of this project is the substituting of full copper parts by copper-aluminium hybrid parts by using electromagnetic pulse welding (EMW) solving the conflict between technological benefits arising from the excellent properties of copper and disadvantages regarding its cost and weight.

eu funded project joinem

Global trends are forcing industry to manufacture lighter, safer, more environmentally friendly, more performant and cheaper products. As a consequence, all industrial branches are continuously seeking innovative approaches in the fields of materials development, manufacturing systems engineering and processing technologies.
The JOIN'EM project goes in this direction, in particular it will:

  • Develop innovative methods for joining dissimilar metals, which will allow improved manufacturing or new products. These innovations will also deliver increased product reliability, a longer lifetime of the components and welds, combined with a reduction of maintenance costs.
  • Facilitate an increased use of dissimilar metal combinations. Up to now, this has been prevented due to the difficulty of welding multi-material-combinations using conventional welding processes. Overcoming this obstacle will open up a wide potential of manufacturing functionally optimised, lightweight and high- performant products, which are not possible today.
  • Increase productivity and reduce costs for realising hybrid components using EMW (electromagnetic welding): joining operations are performed faster, more efficiently and robustly, thus more economically, due to a less expensive production process while guaranteeing better quality.
  • Permit the achievement of lower life cycle cost of a product.
  • Enable the use of the environmentally-friendly EMW process. The process needs no fluxes or shielding gases and produces no harmful smoke, fumes or slag, thus reducing the overall environmental impact. EMW is a high-speed joining technology using pulsed magnetic fields. The joint is formed without heat, but due to the impact of the joining partners. Disadvantages associated with conventional technologies are avoided and high-quality dissimilar material combinations can be joint.

Alke' is industrial partner of JOIN'EM project, and during the project will test the developed technologies on its vehicles.

JOIN’EM aims at decrease the consumption of copper (that is an high cost material) by partially substituting it with aluminium, which costs only about 30% compared to copper.
The benefits that will lead this project are numerous:

  • Decrease in the consumption of high cost and critical materials
  • A higher level of automation and lower production times compared to current technologies
  • Ecologically friendly products and resource efficiency
  • At least 30% improvement of the product performance without increasing the final price
  • Significant improvement of the working conditions
joinem horizon 2020

For more details on JOIN'EM project see: www.join-em.eu
The JOIN'EM project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. H2020-FoF-2014-677660.
Responsibility for the information and views set out in this web page lies entirely with the authors.

The JOIN'EM project consists of 14 project partners

joinem partners