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THE PURPOSE of this experiment was to determine the role of residual stresses in fatigue strength independent of other factors usually involved when residual stresses are introduced. It consisted of an investigation of the influence of residual stresses introduced by shotpeening on the fatigue strength of steel (Rockwell C hardness 48) in unidirectional bending. Residual stresses were varied by peening under various conditions of applied strain. This process introduced substantially the same amount and kind of surface cold working with residual stresses varying over a wide range of values. It was found that shotpeening of steel of this hardness is beneficial primarily because of the nature of the macro-residual-stresses introduced by the process. There is no gain attributable to “strain-hardening” for this material. An effort was made to explain the results on the basis of three failure criteria: distortion energy, maximum shear stress, and maximum stress.*

RESULTS of an investigation into the effect of shot-peening variables and the resulting residual stresses on fatigue life are reported in this paper. Leaf springs were the simple specimens heat-treated, cold worked, and tested in this study. Some of the conclusions reached are: 1. There is a minimum shot velocity for each shot size to obtain best fatigue life, and this value is much lower than that normally used. 2. Exposure time for this type of shot-peened specimen beyond some minimum value is wasteful and costly. 3. Shot size has little influence on fatigue life for these specimens. 4. Shot peening specimens while under tensile strain greatly increases fatigue life at 200,000 psi nominal stress over that of nonpeened or strain-free-peened specimens. 5. Shot peening these specimens gave residual compressive stresses 50% of yield strength, and these stresses can be increased to more than 50% by strain peening. 6.

EXPERIMENTAL analyses of residual stresses as related to fatigue properties and to the surface failure known as spalling are discussed in this paper. How those processing operations such as heat-treatment, machining, grinding and straightening contribute the factors causing residual stresses and what are the practical methods of measuring these stresses are also described here.