14th International Conference on Shot Peening

Dry Ice Blasting to Increase Fatigue Strength

Jürgen Hoffmeistera, Elmar Schucha, Simone Doell-Eberhardinger

Esslingen University, Faculty of Mechanical and Systems Engineering, Kanalstr. 33, 73728 Esslingen, Germany – juergen.hoffmeister@hs-esslingen.de

Introduction

Dry ice blasting, also called dry ice cleaning, is a compressed air blasting process that uses dry ice at a temperature of -78.5 °C as blasting medium. There are two main advantages of the process, on the one hand, even sensitive workpieces can be treated with little damage due to the low hardness of the blasting medium and, on the other hand, dry ice evaporates after blasting, so that no longer the workpiece needs to be cleaned of the blasting medium. With regard to the effect on the surface layer state, it has already been shown by [1, 2], that dry ice blasting can influence both the hardening depth profiles and the residual stress state.

Objectives

The influence of dry ice blasting on the fatigue strength was investigated. In this project two materials were used a tool steel 90MnCrV8 in the soft annealed condition and an aluminum alloy AlMg3.