TABLE OF CONTENTS Laser shock peening (LSP) is a very useful surface treatment technique in practical applications. It can create a compressive residual stress of a significant magnitude, beneath the treated surface and deep into the treated metallic components. Compressive residual stress introduced by LSP can significantly improve the mechanical performance of components, such as resistance to crack initiation and growth with extended fatigue life and enhanced fatigue strength.
Over the past 20 years, in order to improve this technique, many experimental studies on the effects of the relevant parameters of LSP have been carried out. However, dynamic responses of peened materials are very complex and it is difficult to monitor them instrumentally. To fill in this gap, a simulation technique is widely recognised as an effective tool to gain a understanding of the LSP process.
Because of the complexity of shock wave propagation in an alloy component, it is essential that the simulation can be correctly performed using a suitable computing capacity. The computer technology has developed rapidly in recent years. Two-dimensional computation with 10 6 computational cells was considered a substantial task two decades ago, but nowadays dynamic three-dimensional computation can be easily performed with more than 10 9 computational cells (Oran and Boris, 2001). This means that a normal workstation or even a desktop PC with CPU over 1 GHz and RAM over 2 Gb would have plenty of capacity to perform the simulation of complicated dynamic events like the LSP process.
A confined ablation mode...
