Residual stress profiles for mitigating fretting fatigue in gas turbine engine disks

The driving force for fretting fatigue in engine disks is the contact stresses generated by fretting of the blade and the disk surfaces in the attachment region. This paper examines the use of different residual compressive stress profiles to counteract the undesirable effects of contact stresses and to mitigate fretting fatigue. A global finite-element analysis of the disk blade assembly is first performed. The contact pressure and shear traction at the attachment region are extracted from the FEM results and used to compute the contact stress distribution. The contact stresses are then combined with the residual stresses and the bulk stresses. The overall stress distribution is then utilized in a probabilistic crack growth model to predict the risk of disk failure for a military engine under simulated loading conditions. The results are used to identify the minimum residual stress profile for mitigating fretting fatigue in engine disks.