Technical Note: The Effect of Shot Peening on the Polarization Behavior of Steel Available to Purchase

Cold work is deformation of a crystal or polycrystal under conditions that leave a significant amount of crystalline disorder in the material.¹  The detailed nature of the tangled dislocation arrangements depends upon the material and the conditions of deformation.²  Shot peening is a surface deformation process which produces a surface layer residually stressed in compression.³  The process involves hammering the surface of the material with steel balls, or shot, which strike and deform the surface layers plastically in tension and the subsurface layers elastically in tension, and after deformation, contraction of the subsurface layer causes the surface layer to be in a residual balancing compression.³  Shot peening has been used mostly to improve the fatigue properties of materials,⁴  and its effect on corrosion has been limited to improving the resistance of stainless steels to intergranular attack. A number of publications have considered the effects of...