Shot peening and peen forming finite element modelling – Towards a quantitative method

Peen forming is commonly used on aluminium alloys in the aerospace industry for wing skin shaping. Numerous analytical, numerical, and experimental studies have been made to better understand the effects of various peening parameters on the final material state and to predict deformed shapes, but conclusions were often limited to trends. The purpose of this study is therefore to develop and verify experimentally quantitative numerical tools for peen forming applications by studying the simple case of peening an Almen-sized AA-2024 aluminium strip in an Almen holder. The first step consisted in improving an existing random dynamic model by determining optimal dimensions. The AA-2024 target mechanical behaviour was characterized experimentally and a combined isotropic-kinematic hardening law was selected to model the material behaviour. The dynamic impact model and material constitutive law provided good prediction of peening-induced stresses in thick AA-2024 for two shot velocities. The sequence-sensitive aspect of the forming process was also investigated and a new shell-based finite element model was proposed. Numerical and experimental results for three shot velocities were compared to evaluate the validity of this numerical simulation method and promising agreement was observed.