Study on the Effect of Laser Quenching on Fretting Fatigue Life

Laser quenching hardening is one of the most used surface treated technologies. In order to study the effect of laser quenching on the fretting fatigue life, fretting fatigue experiments of TC11 (Ti-6.5Al-1.5Zr-3.5Mo-0.3Si) titanium alloy specimens with different surface conditions were carried out on a special hydraulic servo fatigue test system. The experimental results showed that laser quenching hardening has a good performance in increasing the fretting fatigue lives of the TC11 alloy. However, the effects of laser quenching on fretting fatigue are more obviously at low stress level than at high stress level, the fretting fatigue life was increased by 110.78% at low stress level and 17.56% at high stress level, respectively. Based on the critical plane approach, the traditional SWT (Smith–Watson–Topper) parameter was modified and used to describe the fretting fatigue life of the TC11 alloy after hardening by the consideration of the variations of the hardening layer’s elastic modulus. Compared with the experimental results, all the errors of the predicted results lied in the error band of two.