Study of Impact Velocity on Residual Stress and Surface Hardness of SKD11 in Shot Peening Process

Shot peening process could create compressive residual stress and increase surface hardness and hence also used to improve material surface properties in case thermal effect is to be avoided. The shot peening process parameters such as pressure which result in different shot impact velocity could affect the compressive residual stress distribution which results in different post-process material properties. The ability to understand and predict the effect of process parameters on stress distribution could be very useful to control and obtain material properties as required. In this work, a shot peening process commercially available locally was investigated. The residual stress distribution after shot peening of SKD11 was studied using the finite element (FE) technique. A single shot impact was simulated. A maximum velocity with a miximum impact angle was assumed. The computational predictions showed higher compressive residual stress developed with increasing shot velocity as expected due to higher impact energy. However, experimental results suggested that the process arrangement and machine control highly affect the properties of the material after process. The compressive residual stress and surface hardness obtained experimentally was almost unchanged with an increase in pressure from 0.35MPa to 0.6MPa. It was found that, due to machine arrangement, an increase in impact velocity at higher pressure was relatively small and did not observed in all effected area due to fixed arrangement of nozzle and samples. Hence, research results suggested that a detail computational methodology including the effect of unevent impact velocity and impact angle should be employed to increase the predictive ability of the FE model. The current work could be extended to include such effects with no major difficulty to develop useful information for the design of shot peening process for any specific machine and arrangement.