Microscale Modeling to Study Shot Peening Effects on Aluminum Alloy

Abstract

Shot peening is a cold working process used to produce a compressive residual stress to modify mechanical properties of metals. It causes impacting a surface with shots with significant force to create plastic deformation. The compressive residual stresses developed by shot peening process helps to avoid the propagation of micro-cracks exist in surface. Shot peening process is often used in aircraft industries to relieve tensile stresses built up in the grinding process, and replace them with beneficial compressive residual stresses. Shot peening has been developed to increase the fatigue strength of metallic parts. Compressive residual stress and surface hardening induced by shot peening process are found beneficial to increase the fatigue life and the resistance to stress corrosion cracking within the metallic component. Even though shot peening has been used for more than 50 years, a review of published papers indicates a lack of studies in numerical modeling. In particular, the effect of complex shot peening process to predict the target material responds to the multiple impacts of shots is not fully revealed. Most studies have investigated the fundamental mechanism and characteristics of fatigue improvement by single shot peening, and have studied the compressive residual stress induced by single normal impact on the surface of the specimen. However, single impact model is appropriate and efficient for sensitivity studies, local plastic effect, and indentation estimation. It is well known that the residual stress by single shot model is not suitable for practical use. The residual stress field from multi impacts is the resultant sum of all the fields by repeated and progressive impacts. It is not feasible to extrapolate results from the single impact model to a practical shot peening process with multiple impacts. Therefore, this research attempts to conduct a microscale modeling to study the shot peening effects of aluminum alloy responds to single and multiple impacts. First, a single shot impact model, representing single shot peening process, has been developed for the estimation of indentations at different velocities. The numerical simulations has been performed with the finite element software code LS-DYNA. The validations of the numerical simulations has been made from experimentally measured surface roughness data. Once the finite element code of single shot peening model is validated, additional numerical models are developed to simulate multiple shot peening process, using multiple impact shots. The multiple impact model are developed for the estimation of the residual stress field.