Increase in Reliability of Metal Articles with Impulse Current Effect

Abstract

Investigation in duration effect of powerful electric current impulses on variation process of some properties of steels 40 and 45 and titanium alloy VT1-0 working in the high-cycle fatigue regimes was performed and nature of such an effect was detected in the research. By measuring the ultrasonic speed it was shown that electric current effect results in increase in reliability of articles.

Effect of electropulsing on the fatigue resistance of aluminium alloy 2014-T6

“…The effect achieved by the treatment cannot be associated with the heat effect as the registration and numerical modelling show a negligible temperature rise of about 2 o C which cannot promote any changes in the metal. The possible origin of the changes is via the non-thermal effect of the electric current and magnetic field as previously discussed in the literature [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]43]. Based on TEM observations as well as on measurements of microhardness and conductivity, it can be concluded that the treatment causes increased precipitation of GP-zones and leads to rearrangement of dislocations (see Figure 9).…”

“…The development of new cost-effective techniques for fatigue resistance enhancement of metals is a challenge that is being addressed by both academic and industrial researchers. Among these techniques, the application of electropulsing [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] and the application of magnetic fields [21][22][23] are attracting attention, yet systematic investigations are still lacking. The similarity between these two treatments must be noted as a changing electric current in a conductive medium produces a magnetic field and vice versa.…”

“…Previous investigations have reported that electropulsing can extend the fatigue life of steel [10,14,16,19,20,24], copper [25], titanium [9,13] and aluminium [26,27] alloys. Levitin et al [9] examined the effects of electropulsing on the fatigue resistance of titanium and found that fatigue life increased by 25-50%.…”