Residual stress and microstructure evolution of shot peened Ni-Al bronze at elevated temperatures

In this work, the relaxation of residual stress and strain hardening effect along with the evolution of microstructure of Ni-Al bronze at elevated temperatures were investigated. The samples were peened and then isothermal annealed at temperatures ranging from 200 to 400 °C for different time. The residual stress in the surface layer were determined by X-ray stress analyzer. Variations of domain size and micro-strain were estimated by X-ray line profile analysis in which the modified Williamson-Hall method with uniform deformation energy density model was employed. Experimental results showed that both residual stress and strain hardening effect relaxed dramatically in the initial stages and then gradually reached steady state. Although partially recrystallization occurred at higher temperatures, only part of compressive residual stress relaxed at each fixed temperature. The micro-strain and the dislocation density also declined with the heating temperature and exposure time increasing, which were presumably related to the vacancy transportation and dislocation rearrangement. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by XRD and TEM, the domain size increased significantly. The thermal relaxation activation enthalpies of residual stress and X-ray full width at half maximum were evaluated via Zener-Wert-Avrami relationship. The latter value was larger than that of residual stress, which indicated that the strain hardening effect was more difficult to fade at elevated temperatures. Hardness also reduced continuously during annealing process, which was mainly ascribed to the increased domain size and the weakening strain hardening effect. No phase transition occurred and the crystallinity was improved after annealing treatment. In the present study, the residual stress did not release completely even after annealing at the highest aging temperature for 2 h, which meant that shot peening could enable Ni-Al bronze alloys to keep excellent thermal stability of beneficial compressive residual stress.