Residual Stress Modeling and Measurement in Aluminum Wrought Alloys

Abstract

X-ray diffraction and hole-drilling methods are applied to measure the residual stresses in a turbo charge compress wheel made of aluminum wrought alloys for finite element model validation. Aluminum wrought alloys are usually subjected to heat treatment which includes quenching after solution treatment to improve aging responses and mechanical properties. Rapid quenching can lead to high residual stress and severe distortion which significantly affect dimension stability, functionality and particularly performance of the product. A finite element based approach was developed by coupling a nodal-based transient heat transfer algorithm with material thermo-viscoplastic constitutive model, to model residual stress and distortion during heat treatment for robust product design and durability assurance. The comparison shows that hole-drilling residual stress measurements provide more accurate and reliable results than X-ray diffraction for this particular part and material. A good agreement between residual stress measurement and FEA prediction has demonstrated that the integrated residual stress model is robust in predicting residual stresses and optimizing heat treatment of aluminum wrought alloys.