Post-processing of Laser Additive Manufactured Inconel 718 Using Laser Shock Peening

The components built using new generation feature based design and manufacturing process, called laser additive manufacturing (LAM) is inherited with tensile residual stress due to rapid heating and cooling during material processing. Laser shock peening (LSP) is an advanced surface engineering process that imparts beneficial compressive residual stresses into materials yielding longer product life by increasing the resistance to many surface-related failures, such as wear. LSP is widely used by various industries including aerospace, power generation, chemical processing, etc. to increase the life of engineering components. This paper reports LSP of LAM built Inconel 718 and the parametric study is conducted by varying peak laser power and number of shots at three different levels. Optimum laser power and number of shots derived using grey relational analysis is found to be 170 mW and 7, respectively for maximum hardness and minimum depth of profile. The investigation show that LSP changed the surface morphology and mechanical properties of the LAM built structure. The surface investigation using optical profilometer and Vickers micro-hardness shows a maximum profile depth of 10 μm and hardness of 360 HV. Residual stress measurement indicates compressive residual stress of 214.9–307.9 MPa on the LAM sample surface after LSP. The wear studies show an improvement by a factor of 1.70 for LSP treated LAM samples as compared to that of as-built condition. This study unwrap avenues for using LSP as property enhancement post-processing technique LAM fabricated structures with geometrical complexities.