Physics-Based Prediction of Residual Stresses for Fatigue and Fatigue Crack Growth Life Assessment

An explicit computational framework for surface treatments; such as laser shock peening (LSP), low plasticity burnishing (LPB), and shot peening (SP) is highly sought by turbine engine designers in the ability to accurately capture relevant residual stress and damage states. Corvid proposes using an explicit finite element modeling approach to predict the state of materials following the laser shock peening process. Corvid will utilize Velodyneâ„¢, an in-house commercial HFCP code, as the backbone for this analysis. Velodyne specializes in high strain rate physics problems, including blast, hyper-velocity impact, and the subsequent damage to materials. The software is highly scalable for large problem sizes and is therefore capable of capturing the physics of surface treatment processes using an appropriate mesh resolution, while also keeping runtime within a reasonable timeframe. To explore processing sensitivities, Corvid proposes coupling Velodyne with DAKOTA to explore a full parametric study of LSP in an automated parallel environment. The residual stress gradient profiles from the fully validated LSP explicit models will be integrated into a fatigue assessment test case to calculate an effective crack growth life. Finally, these computationally intensive high-fidelity multi-physics LSP simulations will be used as training data for transitioning to reduced order models.