Effects and optimization of biomimetic laser shock peening on residual fatigue life improvement of aluminum alloy used in aircraft skin

This paper aims to study the effects of biomimetic laser shock peening (BLSP) on crack resistance ability of aluminum alloy aircraft skin. The extracted feature parameters obtained from cherry leaves obey normal distribution. Based on the extracted biomimetic parameters, a 3D finite element model (FEM) is developed to study the effects of BLSP treatment on the residual stress distribution, stress intensity factors and residual fatigue life of specimens. Results show that BLSP treatment contributes to form leaf-shaped residual stress distribution. In-depth residual stress field is divided into three layers of compressive residual stress at both surfaces and tensile stress in the middle. Since the compressive residual stress generated by BLSP balances the load applied on specimens, stress intensity factors of treated specimens are reduced effectively, greatly increasing residual fatigue life. The asymmetry of residual stress distribution facilitates crack turning to prolong the crack path. An artificial neural network (ANN) with three layers is established to predict the optimal structure by linking with Monte-Carlo method (MCM). The relative error of the ANN-MCM prediction, merely 3.26%, indicates that the proposed method is able to employed to save design time and computation resource.