Hill Engineering Blog

ASM Heat Treating Society 31st Annual Conference And Exhibition

Hill Engineering is presenting “Evaluation of forging process induced residual stress in aluminum die forgings” at the ASM Heat Treating Society 31st Annual Conference and Exhibition. Held Tuesday, September 14, 2021 – Thursday, September 16, 2021 in St. Louis, MO, Heat Treat is the premier conference and expo for heat treating professionals; attracting global innovators, researchers, influencers and decision makers from around the world. This year’s conference and expo will feature two-and-a-half days of face-to-face networking opportunities with approximately 200 heat treat exhibitors/companies. The abstract text is presented below.

Aircraft structural components are being produced from forgings with increasingly complex geometries in a wide range of aerospace alloys. The forging process involves a number of steps required to attain favorable material properties (e.g., heat treatment, rapid quench, cold work residual stress relieving, and artificial aging). These processing steps, however, also result in the introduction of bulk residual stress. Excessive bulk residual stresses can have negative consequences including: part distortion during machining and/or during service, reduced crack initiation life, increased crack growth rates, and an overall reduction in part life. This presentation will summarize recent work related to quantifying and accounting for residual stress in aluminum die forgings. Key residual stress engineering concepts will be described. Since the artifacts studied are associated with an aircraft supply chain (multiple parts and multiple lots), the results are relevant to the aerospace community. Overall, the results show that forging residual stress is a repeatable phenomenon with approximately 30 MPa part-to-part variation. (Distribution A: case number 88ABW-2019-3062)

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